"Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance" comes from the "Jaws 2" school of film making. For those of you who missed that (less than) venerable effort that school's motto goes something like this: "Strike while the iron is hot. All other considerations secondary." And boy have the makers of GR2 taken that motto to heart.
The first Ghost Rider film was an unexpected gem of sorts. It was pretty well crafted, fun as hell and rooted firmly in the lore of the desert southwest where the ghost town was practically invented. The film floated on a sea of ready made mythology with the cursed Johnny Blaze roaming the horizonless landscape of the desert night aboard his trusty stead, a chip on his shoulder the likes of which hadn't been seen since The Man with No Name wandered into that little town by the lakeshore.
This new effort eschews any such firm footing. It seems the film makers were confident that the Ghost Rider mythology was a stand-alone affair that could be plopped down anywhere and plugged into the local zeitgeist. In this case somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Well they were wrong. Divorced from the desert landscape and the unspoken mythological underpinnings that made the first film click Ghost Rider 2 stumbles out of the blocks, never gets back on its feet and drags itself across the finish line long after most of the audience has gone home.
Everyone involved needs to take their share of the blame for this one including Cage who mails in his performance to a degree that's startling even for him. As for directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor I can only assume they were asleep during most of the production as the film has no momentum, no kick and what passes for 'fun' here is a repeated cut back to JB pissing fire. In a move that smacks of desperation they even try to dredge up some semblance of the chaotic energy of their "Crank" films by having Cage go through a few minutes of Jason Statham-like facial contortions. It's as though they woke up after shooting wrapped, took a look at what they had and panicked.
"What are we gonna do?"
"I know! We'll call Nick back to do some of that facial contortion stuff like Jason did in Crank and then we'll insert a minute of it anytime things get too dismal."
"Hey, good idea!"
Not really. A better idea would have been to admit defeat and shelve the project.
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