As a result, the Spirit of the Ghost Rider is wandering Hell without a host. This time, his check was cashed by Mephisto. And that fire-peeing scene? They made it Marvel Comics canon in Thanos Legacy #1.Johnny Blaze is dead…again. It understood and leaned into every word of that sentence and became a frenetically insane cinematic masterpiece.ĭon't believe me? What's the ultimate mark of a good comic book movie? Having some of those ideas reverse-engineered into the comics. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance knows exactly what it is: a Ghost Rider movie starring Nicolas Cage and directed by (one of ) the guys from Crank. Somewhere else in there is a whole sequence of Nic Cage mugging like Bruce Campbell in the Evil Dead movies and sporadically snorting flames as his face falls away.īecause this movie also features two car chases in the first ten minutes, numerous animated flashbacks (including one of Blaze's bare ass), a decay-powered supervillain eating a Twinkie, Idris Elba turning to ash and headbutting the same supervillain in the face, Danny running up Blaze's chest and literally screaming fire into Nic Cage's face, Nic Cage running around with his face on fire, and that's before all of it culminates in Ghost Rider wrapping Rourke with chains and literally throwing the devil back to Hell.īecause, you see, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance doesn't need excuses. Ten minutes in the other direction, and the Rider will vomit chains and get his face pulled off. Ghost Rider has already, in literally the ten minutes before the fire-peeing scene, vomited molten bullets onto a goon and possessed a building-sized piece of mining equipment, laughing like an actual, literal dolphin as he swings the flaming bucket excavator around. A WTF Moment in a movie that traffics almost entirely in WTF Moments. Not to worry, folks: the man with the flaming skull turns and gives an over-the-shoulder head nod to the audience at the end. The boy's dour mood is lifted.īut what about us, the audience? Maybe we, the people watching Ghost Rider emptying his flame-bladder, feel a little like we're intruding -like maybe we weren't meant to see this undoubtedly brimstone-scented bathroom behavior. In the context of the film, it seems to work Danny laughs. That's Ghost Rider, the brooding, demon-possessed stuntman with the ability to turn a person's sins against them and make them feel the pain of their victims, urinating fire to entertain a child. The audience, of course, is left to imagine what that would really look like – what the visual mechanics of Ghost Rider peeing "like a flamethrower" would actually constitute – because there's no way a major motion picture would ever divert any amount of actual funds to actually animating … It is at this point that Nicolas Cage - and, really, Cage and his human character are completely interchangeable in this film - moves to the side of the, again, moving truck, and mimics peeing, complete with fire noises, holding his hands wider than any actual human could have ever evolved. "What happens," Danny asks, "if you have to pee when you're on fire?" The scene is a welcome slowdown in what has, up until now, largely been an amphetamine high masquerading as a ghost story, and offers a remarkably touching moment as well. Sensing the boy's unease at discovering that he, too, is the victim of a demonic curse, and having seen his yearning for a father figure, Blaze offers his ear and his years of wisdom to Danny, should the young man want them. Blaze, as his fire-skulled alter-ego, the Ghost Rider, has just saved Danny from the clutches of a nefarious gang, led by Danny's mom's ex-boyfriend, funded by the devil and armed with the finest illegal weaponry in all of whatever vaguely Eastern European country they're supposed to be in. There's a scene about halfway through 2011's Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, where Nicolas Cage's Johnny Blaze is sitting on the back of a moving tow-truck, fixing up his motorcycle, and chatting with a young Danny Ketch.
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