I’m a comic book apologist. At 32 years old, I still regularly buy and read comics from Marvel, DC and Image Comics and I don’t intend to stop any time soon.

But sometimes there are comic book movies that just need to be put out of their misery and buried deep down under ground, in a coffin where no one can be tempted to spend any form of currency on them.

Several movies spring to mind: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Spawn, Punisher War Zone, Elektra, Jonah Hex and - probably the most notorious – 2007’s Ghost Rider starring Nicolas Cage.

Despite 2007’s Ghost Rider being a complete flop - and the ire that this movie attracted from hardened comic book fans - Marvel Knights (the “dark” side of the Marvel Universe) still thought the franchise had some life left in it. At least this is what directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor thought as they took on the job of resurrecting this ailing character in a sequel called Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.

The build-up at San Diego Comic-Con last year, the numerous viral trailers around the interwebz, and the promise that Ghost Rider would be as mad and bipolar as the Crank movies that made Neveldine and Taylor so famous, screamed “potential”… even if Nic Cage was brought back as the movie’s lead character Johnny Blaze.

Here’s the problem with comic book sequels: all too often these movies focus too much on origins and back story instead of giving us the story we all paid our 60 bucks to see.

But Neveldine and Taylor treated the sequel as a clean slate, which I kind of liked.

The movie plays out as if the previous movie never happened, but it guides you through the back story at the appropriate moments with a bunch of clever minimalist animated clips, which is a refreshing way of doing superhero movies. It takes far less time and it has much more impact if you do things this way.

We don’t need to see Krypton blowing up, or a spider biting Peter Parker over and over again to know where heroes come from. Stoppit!

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is certainly grittier than its predecessor. The special effects are orders of magnitude better and the directors tried hard to make Ghost Rider play out like a Crank movie without having to cast Jason Statham in the lead role.

There are times of insanity, with quick cuts of Johnny Blaze as a human, then as a flaming demon, and then half and half, while riding his flaming motorcycle at high speed, in pursuit of the bad guys, to the sound of mental thrash a metal soundtrack. I feel it worked in some places, but there wasn’t enough in others. For me, Ghost Rider wasn’t mad enough in this movie.

He’s a flaming lunatic in the comics, so why must he spend precious minutes of celluloid just standing around, staring down a gang of bad guys, instead of ripping them to shreds and eating their souls?

Don’t get me wrong, this movie has its moments. When there is action on the screen it’s pretty good but there’s definitely space for more “BOOM” and “KAPOW” and less blah blah blah.

What’s the bottom line? Well, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is definitely better than the original. But more like Transformers 3 is better than Transformers 2. It’s more about escapism than sitting down and looking for intellectually-challenging movie making.

If it’s pure throw-away diversion you’re after…Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance might just be what you’re looking for.



Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is available to rent on BoxOffice right now.