Few actors are as pleasurable to watch in an action film as Nicolas Cage. With his rumbling voice, shark's grin, and thick, arching brows that suggest an unholy spawn of Jack Nicholson and Wile E. Coyote, he has all the cocksure, devil-may-care attitude of someone who (please pardon the pun) has been to hell and back and cannot wait for another invite. That attitude has elevated films as different as Wild at Heart and Con Air, especially Con Air, since he sports the same Southern accent - the one that sounds like Sylvester Stallone imitating Elvis Presley - in this movie, as well.
That aforementioned attitude has found its way into a comic book adaptation, and it is about time, too. Because in Ghost Rider, Cage does what many actors, even in good comic book adaptations, forget to do and he has fun. Make no mistake about - Cage has the time of his life playing a comic book character, and his glee is the prime reason why the film works so well.
There is something truly satisfying about watching an actor ease into a role that seems tailor made for him, and like Ron Perlman in Hellboy, he takes the character and makes it all his own.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Ghost Rider's alter-ego is a real daredevil, Johnny Blaze, who once sold his soul to Satan (Peter Fonda), who at least does a better job in the role than Peter Stormare did in Constantine. Blaze sells his soul to save his father from cancer, but then he dies in a motorcycle accident (don't you hate it when that happens?). Many years later, he fills stadiums clearing 30 trucks with his bike and surviving falls that would kill Evil Knievel. He becomes the Rider, a leather-clad biker/bounty hunter for the devil, assigned to collect the souls of the damned and send them to hell where they belong. When a group of renegade demons plot to overthrow Satan and start the Apocalypse, Blaze is commissioned by Satan to dispatch them; the film then whizzes through its action scenes at such breakneck speed that nobody bothers to stop and ask the same question no one bothered to ask in Constantine - why would the Devil want to prevent the Apocalypse in the first place?
Most comic book adaptations often occupy two extremes of the spectrum - dark and morose, or light and cheery, but what is so enjoyable about Ghost Rider is the way it achieves a comfortable middle ground. The film contains images of ghosts, hell, the damned, demons, corpses, and a phantom with a fiery skull for a head, but it skips along on its merry way and never looks back. The film even makes time for a love interest (played by the radiant Eva Mendes) and a supporting role by Sam Elliot as a gravedigger hermit who knows the secret to defeat the powers of hell; it is a true testament to the talent of Sam Elliot that he somehow makes this role seem like one he was born to play. The film skirts a very thin line between enjoyably silly and just plain idiotic (a la The Fantastic Four), but it works nevertheless. It works because it never takes itself even remotely seriously, because it has not only the atmosphere of a comic book but the spirit of one as well, and because of Cage. B
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