Is Ghost Rider really an adaptation of the popular Marvel comic character? If it were, wouldn’t it contain at least some components of the comic’s 200-or-so-issue heritage, rather than consist of an anthology of modern superhero film tics and predictable plot situations?

The movie’s Ghost Rider is Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage), who as a youth (Matt Long, a Tom Cruise clone) in a traveling daredevil carnival show makes a deal with the devil (Peter Fonda, hammily channeling David Carradine from Kill Bill) to save the life of his father (Brett Cullen). Naturally, there is a loop hole. Years later, Satan returns to call in his chit, which requires that as night falls, Johnny becomes the Ghost Rider, a bounty hunter sent out to retrieve those apparitions who have escape hell’s circles, specifically, one Blackheart (Wes Bentley, made up to look like Pugsley), who is rounding up other souls, or „ whatever. This proves awkward, because by now Johnny has become a world famous stunt rider in the mode of Evel Knievel, able to take risks because thanks to Satan’s contract, and like the cheerleader herself, he cannot be harmed. Also, Johnny has just been reunited with the love of his life, Roxanne (Eva Mendes).

The history of the comic book character is complex. He may appear new, but in fact he was a character in Tim Holt comics from the early 1950s resurrected by Marvel as a cowboy comic hero in 1967 when the original trademark ownership lapsed. After then he was changed even more, the short-lived seven-issue cowboy comic eventually giving way to the new, horror-inflected character when Marvel went Goth in the early 1970s (and then there was a re-imagined line of Ghost Rider comics starting in 1990).

Out of all those comic books, there must have been at least one or two iconic, definitive tales that could bear adaptation. But as with almost all the Marvel adaptations in the last several years, not to mention what’s done in Batman and Superman movies, the comics are more or less ignored in favor of familiar big bang blockbuster movie tropes, which Hollywood seems to think the public wants more than accurate adaptations. And they may be right, since Ghost Rider made over 50 million its opening weekend. This is why Alan Moore is always peeved at what is done to his books, and why we Moore acolytes pray that there is never a movie adaptation of Watchmen (though we might be willing to accept an HBO mini series). But even without too much of the comic’s iconography the filmmakers still had potentially interesting material, since there aren’t that many devil pact movies (there’s Crossroads and Bedazzled, and only a few others).

But then, almost all movies today are cartoons. There are almost all animation, with the actors performing either before a green screen or wearing the swaddling clothes of green screen material. It’s a Photoshop World where we can’t believe anything in it.

Essentially a werewolf story in misdirecting garb Ghost Rider depends for its success on our affection for its title character. Blaze is a reluctant hero with quirks, among them a fixation on an old love. Eventually, that love will be held hostage, so that he must save her (and the world), only, then, to take on the world’s burdens and abandon her yet again. It’s an “origin” story, too, so there is a great deal of sluggish engine grinding which puts the audience about two scenes ahead of the filmmakers at every turn. It all takes place in a dingy world of back alleys and tour busses.

Blaze is a loner surrounded by men who admire him. He watches a lot of TV, especially a show in which a monkey does karate. Blaze cackles over it with an instantaneousness that rivals Mel Gibson’s affection for the Three Stooges in Lethal Weapon. Blaze also likes the Carpenters (even though the love of his life is named Roxanne; shouldn’t he be playing the Police?). He talks to himself in the mirror a like, like Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, and sounds and points like Elvis, even confessing to a desire to become a police officer when he retires from his current carney ways. He drinks coffee out of the pot.

But for an action hero he’s not particularly active. For the first hour and ten minutes he comes to “know” his new self, under the mentorship of a predecessor (Sam Elliott). Even then, he only dispenses with about two deadly spirits, and drives around a bit on his flame dispensing motorcycle.

The villains have pale faces and wear long black leather dusters. Though the music score hints occasionally at Morricone, the film as a whole doesn’t take the cue and go full bore spaghetti western. Villain Blackheart goes looking for colleagues in a biker bar (like the Terminator), then illogically meets up with Mephistopheles, then looks for a graveyard, all along the way killing people who are actually quite helpful. When he absorbs the spirits of others, they enter his body through his mouth. The final battle scene is as boring as we have come to expect from such films, and when the villain dies it is via an intangible, fake, unconvincing pain that makes him writhe orgasmically but you don’t know why, you don’t know what GR actually did to him, given how boringly ineffective the film makes his powers. It’s all a terrible waste.

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