Ghost Rider
12A, 115 mins

Ghost Rider is a Marvel Comics icon who will thrill small boys to bits. Once upon a time a young stunt rider called Johnny Blaze sold his soul to the Devil to heal his father’s cancer. Dad promptly bounced out of bed, kick-started his trusty motorcycle, and snapped his neck jumping through a fairground hoop.

Johnny ages 20 years to become Nicolas Cage, a neurotic and famous nutter who makes suicidal leaps on his bike over helicopters and trucks to conquer his fear of Peter Fonda’s Mephistopheles and the day he has to yield his soul.

BACKGROUND

• Ghost Rider

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• Cage and Branson open whole new comic book

• Blazing saddles

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The comic touches are lovely, but the plot is as corny as a country and western song. Fonda’s Devil comes looking for Cage and employs him as a bounty hunter. There’s a 150-year-old contract to be collected on the damned souls of a frontier town that drowned in its own blood. Other demons who have escaped from Hell — notably the American Beauty star Wes Bentley — want the contract to unleash their own private Armageddon. Cage’s transformation from bemused middle-aged star with jet-black hairpiece to flaming avenger instigates an orgy of special effects.

Johnny’s head turns into a flaming skull. His motorcycle morphs from a customised drop-handle Harley into a liquid metal Alien complete with burning wheels and a leaky petrol tank that leaves a burning strip of molten tarmac all the way to the horizon.

When evil is around Cage has powers beyond his ken. Thankfully an old gravedigger, Sam Elliott, delivers essential pass notes with a voice so deep you suspect his scrotum must reside in his boots. He is the wise old West.

There’s a sulphurous comic whiff of American Werewolf about Mark Steven Johnson’s film. Unfortunately, it remains just that. But great fun was clearly had by all, notably the special effects department.

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