You're the devil's baby mama!
Oh man. I knew it had 14% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I went to see it anyway because I like looking at stuff that's on fire.
To give you something to compare, this bastard was variously written, produced and directed by people who worked on Crank, Crank 2, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, FlashForward, House, The Walking Dead, Jonah Hex, Gamer, and the last two Blades. Now, some of those have real merit; where did this one go so wrong? None of them brought their A game to this project. Also someone let Mark Steven Johnson be a producer (I assume because he's a Marvel executive's otherwise unemployable son, that's the only explanation for why people keep letting him near movie studios).
The movie opens with some guy riding a motorcycle up a mountainy road in what the subtitle calls "Eastern Europe". OMG, really? You don't want to get more specific? Because the credits say Romania ALL OVER THEM. Motorcycle guy is Idris Elba, which is great, and he's headed to a monastery up in the mountains. He drives his motorcycle all loud around the courtyard for the benefit of the bikers in the audience, and then gets in an argument about some kid with a monk from "The Order". I am immediately suspicious because this is Ghost Rider, and much like in John Constantine's continuity, any large organization is no good even if they are Good. Hey wait a minute, that monk is ANTHONY STEWART HEAD! Quick, what do I have to convert to get monk!ASH to marry me? God? I'll give that a shot. Idris Elba is of the opinion that this kid would be better off under the protection of his own monk crew and also the Rider, which is what they'll be calling Ghost Rider throughout the movie in an effort to make him sound slightly less ridiculous. Listen guys, a name like Ghost Rider, you just have to own it. Own it or go home. I wish they had gone home. But yeah, Anthony Stewart Head(!) is like no way, we got this. Some people (it's the devil) are after this kid but only until the winter solstice in a few days. Is it really that warm in Romania in December? No one's wearing much in the way of coats. Unless ASH's got one on under his monk robes.
Suddenly a bunch of black cars drive into the courtyard, and because this is Europe they're regular-sized and not SUVs. Out of various cars come bad-guy-looking grunts and then a guy with hair big enough to declare him the dragon. His name is Carrigan, but out of respect for his 'do I will call him Hairrigan. He and the grunts start shooting up the place, and the monks' security people shoot back, a woman dragging a kid behind her leaves the monastery hastily, shooting at Idris Elba when he offers to help her. Not cool, man. She drives her amusingly tiny car down the mountainy road, and Idris Elba (whose character's name is Moreau) follows on his bike, and then come the bad guys in several black cars, none of them paying enough attention to the plentiful oncoming traffic. How many people are really headed to The Order right now? That's a lot of traffic for a road to a remote mountain-top monastery. There's shooting and driving on everyone's part and the bad guys lose a couple cars but they shoot out Moreau's tire and as he is flung over the cliff he performs a skillful mid-air spin and shoots out a tire on the last bad guy car. Cue movie title.
Then we are treated to some narration by Nicolas Cage over some graphics providing a loose interpretation of what happened in the first movie. I'm gonna assume that they retconned the story to be a little more like the comics, because there is no other useful reason to have changed this stuff. The flaming ring involved in Blaze the Elder's actual first-movie death would have looked cooler than the hospital room they've illustrated in red and black, and it would have hurt my eyes much less that the horrible, lingering shot of Blaze the Younger's bare ass. Thank sweet baby Jesus that it is an illustrated ass. In this version of his origin story, Johnny Blaze signed the devil's contract by smashing a bottle with his bare hand and bleeding all over the signature line (which indicated by one of those little "please sign here" stickies). Seems excessive to me, but this does give Nicolas Cage the opportunity to stare angstily at his hand scar when he runs out of acting.
Two notes: this movie is chock-full of cheeky self-referential shit like the "please sign here" sticky that I'd expect when, say, I was summarizing a movie, but less so in an actual movie. Second note: having Nicolas Cage narrate anything is a terrible idea. He's bad at it. He narrates like Stephen Hawking speed skates: poorly. He will continue to suck at narration throughout the movie, but they keep on letting him at the microphone. Anyway, the (bad) narration tells us that between this movie and the last one he traveled to Europe to escape that demon possessing him (because that works), and now he lives in a storage container/studio apartment in what might be a Romanian landfill or possibly a scrapyard.
Somewhere else in Eastern Europe, the woman with the kid, whose name I don't remember (it's probably Nadia or Natalia or something equally Eastern European) is chillin' at a cafe when a guy in a suit unsubtly removes his wedding ring and walks over to chat her up. He asks a bunch of questions she doesn't directly answer, him suggesting that she's a Romany gypsy and that he would pay good money to sleep with her. Then the kid (whose name is friggin' Danny) comes up asking where Dad is and picks the guy's pocket as he flees (who names a Romanian kid Danny?). They drive off in Nadia’s tiny car, Nadia and Danny, where she laments the kind of life they lead while she pets Danny's head. 1) Nadia, you two were never really picket fence material, as will be shown later. 2) Stop petting his head so much, he's 13.
Back at the landfill or possibly scrapyard, Moreau shows up and gives Johnny Blaze a hard time about fate and souls and the goodness within so that Johnny will go find this kid. Also Moreau promises that his people will fix the whole demon-possession thing if Johnny helps out. Johnny agrees because one of the side effects of being possessed by the Ghost Rider is absolutely terrible acting. You know that one scene in every Nicolas Cage movie where he loses his shit and yells a lot? There's a YouTube compilation of it? That's half the screen time in this movie. Later that evening, Moreau is relaxing with his flask in a literal hole in the wall, waiting for the fun part to start while Johnny wigs out in his studio container, trying to change into Ghost Rider by knocking over a lot of furniture and, from the look on his face, by thinking too much about his recent career moves. He does turn into Ghost Rider eventually, off-screen so we can’t see him, and takes off down the road leaving a flaming trail behind him. This makes Moreau happy. Oh yeah, and there's a hilarious flashback to why Moreau isn't dead: we get a shot of him hanging upside down in a tree right below the edge of the cliff he fell off, grinning at the fact that he is not currently in several different locations along the cliff face.
Further down the same road, Nadia is driving along, petting Danny's face more than she is driving, when the bad guys show up again. They run her off the road and what with all the headlights in her face, she fails to shoot any of them before one gets her in an uncomfortable hold. Turns out she and Hairrigan used to be a thing, and he says a bunch of tired clichés about how she's still a fighter and has spirit and lord have mercy on me, I don't care. The grunts grab Danny out of the car and slam him into the side a few times to take the fight out of him, and I'm pretty sure you're supposed to bring him back in one piece, guys. Just sayin'. Don't want to piss off the devil. This is about when the weird Ghost-Rider-is-approaching sound effects kick in. Who picked this? It sounds like a cross between dolphin clicks and motor noise played back in an echo chamber. Everyone is understandably like wtf? when Ghost Rider lands all noisy and show-offy in the middle of their Circle of Kidnapping without running anyone over. Who blocked this scene? 'Cause that was sloppy.
It is then that this scene, which contains a SKELETON riding a MOTORCYCLE that is ON FIRE somehow becomes boring. I had trouble rectifying these elements in my mind, but this shit is slow. This is way more Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon than Die Hard, and hey directors, this is an AMERICAN ACTION MOVIE. Speed it up, for the sweet love of Bruce Willis. There's about four minutes of looking at the on-fire motorcycle, which is covered in burning pitch and that's overall hellier than a regular non-pitch-covered motorcycle that happens to be generating flames, but less sweet. Then we pan up Ghost Rider, also covered in burning pitch, up to his skull face, and watch him just stand there for an hour and a half. They quite obviously used motion capture because GR is tilting his head around the way Nicolas Cage does when he thinks he's acting, and dude: though normally merely mediocre, that crap is rendered ridiculous by the fact that NO ONE CAN SEE YOUR FACIAL EXPRESSIONS. YOU HAVE NO FACE. YOU ARE A SKULL. Eventually someone in editing woke up from their nap and Ghost Rider zombie lurches over to a random bad guy and stares at him for three weeks. This creeps everyone else out to the point where they DON'T DO ANYTHING, and to spare you my boredom, one day in the far future GR gets out that chain he has and uses it to explode bad guys a la the vampires in Daybreakers. He is interrupted only when Danny bleeds onto the ground, because DANNY IS THE DEVIL'S KID AND THUS HAS POWER OVER GHOST RIDER, I just saved you a lot of stupid hints towards this part of the plot. Hairrigan and the remaining bad guys take advantage of the distraction to shoot Ghost Rider with a grenade launcher (twice) and the scene ends, 50 years after it started.
The next day, Hairrigan's on the phone with the devil, whining about Ghost Rider harshing his mellow. The devil's peace offering is to whisper Devilese into Danny's ear so that he's untrackable to Ghost Rider, though of course Hairrigan still is. That's a crappy peace offering, but this is the devil we're talking about.
Johnny Blaze wakes up in a hospital on sheets white enough to make it obvious that Nicolas Cage is over-dying his hair. It was never that dark before, dude, don't lie. He flirts so badly with the doctor that comes in that she thinks he's hallucinating, and his lines never get better. David S. Goyer, you are the only skilled hand to have touched this travesty. Please tell me you didn't touch this dialogue, because it is waaaay too self-referential. Johnny's still roughed up enough from the grenades that he steals several bottles of morphine pills on his way sneaking out of the hospital, and Nicolas Cage playing a demon-possessed guy strung out on morphine is not pretty. During this sneak, Johnny sees Nadia also sneaking out and follows her. They end up in the parking lot, her aiming the gun no one at the hospital noticed at his head, and he convinces her to trust him by trying to get her to shoot him because he wants to die. What? This apparently works, because they drive off together in a flatbed truck with Johnny's motorcycle on the back.
Whilst driving they have an expository conversation I will relay in brief: Nadia used to date Hairrigan. One of his bad-guy deals ended poorly and blew up a building, and rather than die in the rubble Nadia made a deal with the devil to be his baby mama, a phrase that actually leaves Nicolas Cage's lips. Johnny Blaze is in this mess because Moreau asked him to and also he would like to not be possessed by a demon anymore. He informs Nadia very creepily that because of her netherworld dealings, Ghost Rider wants to suck out her soul. Fair warning, Nadia!
Checking in with Hairrigan and The Eurothugs, who are driving down yet another road, Danny snaps out of his Devilese-induced trance and asks to open a window. When Hairrigan tells him he's not allowed to talk, Danny's response is to lunge forward and grab the steering wheel. There's a struggle to get him off while the car swerves around, and then suddenly Danny lets go and sits back real quick. He buckles his seatbelt and gives Hairrigan the most deservedly smug look ever, and that is when the car starts rolling. Wear your goddamn seatbelts, bad guys! After the car stops, Danny gets the hell out and runs. Hairrigan and Grunt #1, who are somehow not dead, leave the car to explode with Grunt #2 still in it as they chase down Danny. Danny must be a horror movie heroine 'cause he jumps into a ditch and breaks his ankle, whereupon Hairrigan catches up to him. Sadly for those euro-hippiepunks watching from their hippie van 20 feet away, Hairrigan needs a new ride.
Devil Dealers Anonymous is headed to an underground fighting arena where some guy is about to face down a BOAR, because whoever wrote this script is CRAZY. They're looking for a guy Nadia knows who knows Hairrigan. We see the guy walk into his illegal gambling operation all cigars and shouting, and he tells his minions to count every dollar because someone is always stealing from him. All this stealing makes his balls hurt. Then Cigar Guy makes the mistake of wandering off far enough from his minions that Nadia can sneak up on him and sic her drug-addled, demon-ridden leather enthusiast on him. Johnny Blaze yells at Cigar Guy while his eyes keep turning into skull-style empty sockets, because Cigar Guy is evil and Ghost Rider would like to explode him. Cigar Guy tells them that Hairrigan is at the quarry (I guess there's only one in Romania). Cigar Guy, I would also give up info on Hairrigan if that started yelling at me, don't feel bad. Ghost Rider is sufficiently riled up that Johnny takes off for the quarry immediately, to better direct his fiery vengeance at people who are not the devil's baby mama.
At the quarry, there are arms deals going down under what is probably the world's largest quarrying machine. God only knows what it's called (Rock Killer? Stone Murderer?). It's a hundred feet long and covered in what resemble giant circular saws, only they're a foot thick and fifteen feet across and the teeth are steel and chains. It is massive and I want one. But yeah, Hairrigan is buying some very large weapons from a guy, like one-person (really? that is way too big for one person) bunker busters and so on. I don't think Hairrigan even gets a chance to pay the guy before the dolphin-motor-echo noise starts up and here comes Ghost Rider again. Hairrigan balances one of the ludicrously oversized bunker busters on his shoulders and fires, and even though there is a large explosion Ghost Rider doesn't appear to have been hit at all. Wha? Hairrigan's solution is to fire again and this one does make contact, causing Ghost Rider to become sad (you can tell because his head is all smoky instead of all fiery). Okay, hold on: I was under the impression that Ghost Rider is, you know, fireproof, because he is made of fire. If this hypothesis is true, why do explodey weapons hurt him? Is it the shrapnel? Why doesn't a bad guy go get some holy water? Who was responsible for thinking this through before they filmed it? That's not even important right now, because then a mug throws a grenade and this somehow CAUSES GHOST RIDER TO SPIN AROUND LIKE A RECORD IN MIDAIR IN SLOWMO while all the bad guys and me watch in real time and go what the actual, actual fuck. WHO PLANNED THIS SHIT? AND WHO APPROVED IT? WTAF?
Also during this time, Nadia sneaks into a quarry-related building and rescues Danny. But that is unimportant in the face of what happens next: Ghost Rider, getting tired of having his ass beaten and inexplicably spun around in midair, catches sight of the operator's cab on the really, really big machine. The key principle to keep in mind at this point is that whatever Ghost Rider rides turns all fiery. So when Ghost Rider gets in the cab, ALL 100 FEET OF ROCK-KILLING METAL SETS ON FIRE. It is REALLY COOL. I bet the writers were like, what's the biggest thing we could have Ghost Rider ride, and they researched and researched and found this GIANT FUCK-ALL QUARRY MACHINE. The bad guys are unanimously like OH SHIT, and it's just fire and chaos everywhere while Ghost Rider quarries them all right through the pants. Arms Dealer Guy tries to fire another missile but a REALLY BIG rock saw lands on him such that he dies of both being crushed and being blown up. General death is had by all, and Hairrigan gets thrown off-screen by another explosion as Ghost Rider finishes up the carnage and leaves. Woooo!
Nadia and Danny leave most hastily, meanwhile, and they're hauling ass down the road when whoops, here comes Ghost Rider, gunning for the devil's baby mama! He disappears from the rearview mirror only to appear right next to the driver's side and yank Nadia out the window. I guess it helps to have been a stunt rider on these occasions, 'cause I think he's just standing on the bike seat. Of course, when the bike's on fire it's sentient, so maybe it doesn't matter how skilled you are. BTW, I love Fire Bike. It's the best character. It doesn't chew the scenery or yell, and its hair is not terrible. Anyway, yes, Ghost Rider stops to put the Hour-Long Death Stare on Nadia and before he even gets to the good part (at minute 13:45), Danny orders him to stop in a sort of half-Legion voice. Ghost Rider stops because Danny is the devil's kid, they cannot emphasize this enough, and Ghost Rider has to obey him. Ghost Rider turns back into Johnny Blaze, which is a shame. Johnny Blaze is not a skeleton on fire.
The next day (one supposes) the three of them (soul-sucking incident already forgiven) are eating at a truck stop when Johnny notices Danny staring wistfully at a dad petting his kid. There's a lot of kid-petting in this movie. Johnny tries to do the same thing to Danny, and when Danny is like twitch, Johnny is like there was a bee, I thought it was going to sting your face. Okay, Johnny, that was supercreepy. Please never do anything like that ever again. But he does later :( Johnny exposits that he called Moreau (how? with his flaming cell phone?) and that Moreau will meet them on the way to Moreau's monk buddies' place. On the road a-damn-gain, Johnny and Danny have a conversation about fate and souls and the goodness within, the only important part of which is when Danny asks if anything Ghost Rider rides gets all flamey. Like what if he took a cab (my guess: you wouldn't want to be the cabbie) or rode a camel. Point: we already know what happens with animals, we saw the first movie. This does make for a delightful thought exercise, doesn't it? Ghost Rider driving a flaming hearse (for extra deathiness). Ghost Rider on a flaming unicycle. Ghost Rider riding a flaming, skeletal killer whale (imagine the whale noises!). Ghost Rider flying a flaming, skeletal, very confused sky bison. Comment with other ideas, because this is hilarious to me. Much more entertaining than the actual movie.
Back at the quarry, Romanian firefighters are wandering through the wreckage, contemplating the small fires and bodies that are scattered here and there. In a particularly large crater, the devil finds Hairrigan pinned under a big ol' slab of something. The devil is disappointed in how things went down, but Hairrigan doesn't care, because as the SUBTITLES? WHAT? WHAT? say, "sorry jackass, I'm dead". Not for long, bitch! The devil works some devil magic that makes his face get all leprous, and when he's done Hairrigan is unalive and looking like an albino Kurt Cobain. Now that's a proper Ghost Rider villain: skeezy. The devil tells Hairrigan that he's not technically alive anymore, but I wouldn't call him undead either. Also he has the power to rot stuff now, which he's pretty cool with. He sneaks up on an EMT and kills him in the Rotting Zone, another poorly considered special effect where Hairrigan and his victim are the only figures in a black world, and also they look like someone found the speckle filter in photoshop. Hairrigan dryrots the EMT and steals his ambulance for irony's sake.
Back with the good guys, Moreau rides up on his cute little European motorcycle and Johnny takes Danny out on his bike for some fun. The stunt guy does a number of very cool tricks that must be harder than usual with someone riding on the handlebars. This motorcycle fun fades into some sunny yellow mountains full of caves, which are in turn full of monks. My god it's sunny there, damn. Why aren't all those monks hella tan? The head monk is tattooed all over in... Latin, perhaps? The makeup artist has bad handwriting. Let's put it to a vote: full-body tattoos a good sign? Hint: no. Nadia and Danny go off with some monks and Moreau takes Johnny off to cure him like he promised, because Moreau is a nice guy. On the way, he stops to drink a lot of the monks' wine and to show off one bottle that's 2000 years old. He promises Johnny that they'll drink it together when this is all over. 1) Wine doesn't last that long. 2) Death sentence, right there. Also he gives Johnny communion, what movie are we in? Then he tells Johnny the story of the Ghost Rider, accompanied by some nice Three-Brothers-story-in-Deathly-Hallows-type animation. Idris Elba is a much better narrator than Nicolas Cage (I realize that doesn't say much, but still). Ghost Rider used to be an angel of justice, but then someone tricked him into becoming evil, and now he's a demon of vengeance. There's a difference between justice and vengeance, you see (for definitions, watch Batman Begins). Eventually Moreau sends Johnny into a cave with a lot of windows that shine very brightly as we watch Nicolas Cage writhe around on the floor for a while. This fixes him somehow. No more demon. Somehow.
Meanwhile, Hairrigan, driving his stolen ambulance, roots through the dead EMT's lunch. He picks up a sandwich and it gets moldy right fast (power of decay!), and an apple also becomes gross, but he picks up a Twinkie and it's fine, so he eats it out of the wrapper like a Freeze Pop. What a clever "dis" on the perceived properties of Twinkies.
Johnny runs out of the cave network hooting and hollering and doesn't find anyone, but when he finally shuts up he does hear yelling. This is because all the monks and non-Johnny protagonists are gathered in the special Foreshadowing Comes to Fruition chamber. Surprise! the monks are gonna preemptively kill Danny, prevent the apocalypse and whatnot. None of the good guys can do anything because the monks know Finger Fu, and they're all being held by about four monk fingers apiece. Writers, directors, whoever put that in: it's silly. There are like, 80 monks, they don't need special skills to overpower four people. The monks drag Johhny, Nadia and Moreau off one way and take Danny outside to behead him on a rock. A bunch of them stand in a circle and sway and chant because I don't know why. Tattooey is all geared up for first-degree murder when the landscape disappears like a blue screen fail. Hairrigan pops up and spends long enough dispatching monks that I wonder why the other ones don't, you know, do something. He has a harder time with Tattooey because of the badass points all those tattoos will give you, but eventually it's just him and Danny and a bunch of monk mummies.
Johnny and Nadia and Moreau get loose through a whole in the script and are like: shit. Luckily Nadia knows that the trouble is gonna go down in Umlaut Umlaut Something, Turkey, the farthest place from heaven. Really, writers? You couldn't let anyone say the word "Romania", but this is the treatment Turkey gets? I wish I remembered the name of this place so I could find out if it really does have a far-from-heaven reputation, or if someone bullshitted that up. At this joint in Turkey, the devil explains to Danny why he is continually being kidnapped. Maybe we got this explanation earlier but you didn't see the movie, you don't care. Apparently being the devil in a human body is like being a flamethrower made of paper-maché. You can set a lot of shit on fire, but you also burn up. Danny, being the product of the devil and the devil's baby mama, has all the power with none of the setting-himself-on-metaphorical-fire. So the devil's gonna take over Danny's body and Danny will cease to be. Bummer! Depending on how much you like Danny! The transfer will happen by the next dawn, because it's the winter solstice and that matters.
Nadia & co. loot the convenient monastery armory and pop down to Turkey in time to watch all the other devil-with dealers make the scene. They're politicians and CEOs. I'll wait while you reel in shock. Nadia freaks out for a mo, but Johnny reassures her that it'll work out and says "let's go make sure he doesn't become the Anti-Christ". Maybe I'm nitpicking, but isn't Danny pretty much the Anti-Christ already? What they want to do is make sure he doesn't become the actual devil. Whatevs, Nadia’s on sniper duty while Johnny and Moreau sneak into the... ancient satanic temple? What are these ruins they're all standing in? A ancient community theater? 'Cause the politicians and whatnot are set up for the big show in a nice little amphitheater. Nice black robes, guys, original and a preventative against libel lawsuits! Approaching the many, many guards in the pre-dawn, Moreau pulls out the 2000-year-old bottle of wine, because he read ahead in the script, and shares a drink with Johnny. Moreau thinks it's not bad, and Johnny agrees that it would work fine on a salad.
So they're storming the gates and Nadia is sniping guards through the world's best scope (seriously, she can see the wrinkles on Moreau's coat in the dark?), and they get to the amphitheater stage where the devil and Danny are swaying around in unison. Moreau alternates shooting at the politicians and drinking shitty wine until Hairrigan shows up and kills him right quick. As he dryrots, Moreau shouts "I can still see the light!", so.... win? It's kind of a Chirstiany martyr win. Johnny, not one to be stopped by the death of an acquaintance, tries to get at Danny but Danny's covered in a devil-soul-transfer force field and Johnny doesn't have supernatural powers anymore. Crap! The devil, noticing his least favorite stunt rider, chucks Johnny down off the stage, which interrupts the ritual but he doesn't seem to care. The politicians chip in by holding Johnny down while the devil mocks Johnny for not being demon-possessed instead of carrying on with his VERY IMPORTANT CEREMONY YOU'RE GONNA DIE, DUDE, and Danny wanders down to the bottom of the amphitheater to... watch? I can't tell if he's faking deviltude or what. Oh never mind, he's faking, because he turns around to ask the devil if he really has all the same powers and the devil, like a moron, says yes. So Johnny goes "do it!" and Danny vomits fire on him for like, three straight minutes. Guess who's demony again?
It's Ghost Rider. The devil escapes with Danny while GR uses the chain of flamey death to explode a lot of politicians. The Fire Bike rolls up like "WOOOOO!", and Ghost Rider takes off after the devil and Hairrigan takes off after Ghost Rider and Nadia takes off after him, and they're all driving down another goddamn road. These roads are getting to be like season 2 Smallville's hospital. I know it's a conveniently place for Action! and all, but please, a little variety! Ghost Rider uses the fiery death chain to blow up most of the cars and he gets a truck all flamey, but then Hairrigan's on him trying to dryrot a skeleton on fire. I don't even know how that would begin to work. Wizards? They wrestle in the back of the truck and then move to the hood of Nadia’s car for a while. Ghost Rider wins by sucking out Hairrigan's soul, which is why unalive is slightly worse than undead, and Nadia runs the rest of Hairrigan over for good measure.
This is when Fire Bike comes back, like are you finished dallying with that army truck, you philanderer? and Ghost Rider hurries to catch up with the devil's personal vehicle. Also, it's really, really day by now, and I disagree with letting Johnny be Ghost Rider in the middle of the day. It's not very dark or gritty, a flaming skeleton riding in full sunlight. Whatever, Ghost Rider decides that the best way to stop the devil is to get hold an axle with his chain and roll the car approximately 200 feet. Nah, Danny will be fine, he wears his seatbelt! The devil gets out of the car and yell for a while, but Ghost Rider doesn't give a shit, he whips the chain around the devil and yanks him very high into the air, physics be damned. Then GR flings the devil at the ground so hard, right, the devil punches right through and falls all the way back to hell, so: pretty hard.
Ghost Rider yells at the sky for a while after that, and I cannot emphasize this enough, his lack of both a face and an intelligible voice made it really hard to figure out that he was yelling out of happiness. I mean, Spider-Man can talk at least, and the Hulk has a CGI face, but GR is just Nicolas Cage's movements mapped on a flaming skeleton and I CANNOT UNDERSTAND HIM. Apparently he's been saying actual words this whole movie; I thought he was just growling in a variety of pitches. He was so much easier to understand in the first movie! Who thought it was a good idea to make him so damn unintelligible? God, whatever! At least Ghost Rider is still a big old leather-wearing skeleton on fire. I can't tell what the hell is going on with him, EVER, but he does look fucking sweet as balls. Dude's got style.
So Nadia comes running up yelling about Danny, who was in fact in that car you flipped a hundred times, Ghost Rider. Maybe GR probably looks chagrined under all that CGI, it's not like I can tell. GR drags Danny out of the car and he's totally dead, because YOU THREW THE CAR 200 FEET. He's a magically healing devil child, but not that magically healing. Nadia’s kind of upset so I hope she didn't see that Ghost Rider's the one who flipped that car, 'cause she'll totally shoot Johnny in the back of the head. Lucky for him, though, GR turns back into Johnny except for one deus ex machina skeleton hand which is burning blue flames. Johnny can feel the angel inside him now (eeeeeww, dude, megacreepy), and this angel has defibrillator powers. Zap, Danny's alive again, Nadia is happy, and Johnny is possessed by a slightly less evil demon, or a demon and an angel, or perhaps even an angel with a personality disorder. Danny asks if they won, and you're not the devil, so yes, I guess. Johnny answers him with "hell yes!", because that is the cleverest thing the writers could think of to have him say. That is nearly as clever as that endless shot of Ghost Rider pissing flames like a flamethrower that they showed twice. I haven't mentioned that yet because it's horrible.
The end shot is Nicolas Cage narrating over graphics for the hundredth time, and he calls himself Ghost Rider for the first time this whole movie. I was so stunned by this movie that my arms fell asleep.
In sum: Skeletons on fire look really, really cool, but it's arguable as to whether this makes up for everything else.
movie haiku:
As I sat stunned by
this movie's atrociousness
my arms fell asleep