<Review by: Sailesh Ghelani>

Directed by Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor. Starring Nicolas Cage, Ciaran Hinds, Idris Elba, Violente Lacido, Fergus Riordan, Johnny Whitworth.

Utter rubbish and a complete waste of my life, which even the devil from this horrendous film can’t give back to me with a ‘deal’.

Okay, enough is enough guys. Yes you, the guys at Marvel. This offbeat, overly complicated comic book antihero just doesn’t cut it for the big screen. CGI characters like The Hulk have never fared well. And having a protagonist with a CGI skull head on fire who just ‘stares’ at victims and delivers punch lines like “Roadkill!”  is going to fare far worse than everyone’s favourite green giant.

Starting off with a quick graphical synopsis of the first film and how Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) becomes the Ghost Rider, the film moves on to a set up about a boy called Danny (Fergus Riordan) who is on the run with his mother Nadya (Violante Placido) from ‘evil guys’ who are working for the devil: Ciaran Hinds’s Roarke. A kindly ‘priest’ in the form of black French guy Moreau (Idris Elba) with scary contact lenses tries saving the boy and enlists the aid of Ghost Rider in exchange for giving his soul back.

Danny is supposed to possess powers since he’s a spawn of the devil (his mother also made a deal with the devil to save her own life). He bonds with Blaze who takes him on his super cool hell bike and does some wheelies. They run from goon Carrigan (Whitworth) who has the power of decay in his hands. Whatever he touches turns to dust. But then he is driving an ambulance and it doesn’t turn to dust. The filmmakers can hear you thinking that and show you why: he touches food and it decays but he touches food in plastic and it doesn’t. Okay, so that explains that thank you. But later on in the film he decays guns and other inanimate objects, so how does that work? I guess they forgot just like they forgot to make a watchable film.

Nic Cage, an actor that I think has done some good work in the past, needs to burn in hell for subjecting us to his overacting and insanity. Aren’t his financial woes over yet? Does he have to keep doing this tripe?

Ghost Rider as a character lacks personality and the film is so vacuous that I felt nothing inside. The only good thing about the film is the graphic parts where they tell us about backstory and interesting ‘divine’ titbits on fallen angels. I wish the whole film were like that.