First of all... it needs to be said that this is not a good movie. It's ridiculous, and more of an elaborate music video with ADD. Also, I'm fairly certain Nick Cage has some undocumented form of tourrette's syndrome.
Now that we've said that, I actually really dug this movie. All the ridiculous parts are ridiculous on purpose. When you're making a movie starring a raging lunatic, you're just going to have to accept that there's going to be some lunacy, and they manage to layer his weirdness into the kinetic over-the-top-ness they were going for. There's only one scene where Cage full-on loses it, I mean wicker man bee-helmet loses it, and it actually kind of works in context. it's just understood that Johnny Blaze is being driven insane... and it actually informs the visual style they use for his transformations.
The visual for the rider himself is actually much more solidified this time. He's otherworldly and weird... not scary exactly, because he's clearly a super hero, but definitely creepy. They do a better job of creating a solid visual understanding of this character in his first few moments of screen time than the entire first movie. You get a unique character that is true to it's origins but also a great screen character... if this was part of the proper marvel movie universe, this character would actually fit in. He's intense and bad-ass, and you legitimately enjoy his screen time.
The action is probably the best part of this movie... It's kinetic, well-executed, weird, and fun. It was directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the guys who did Crank. They're originally motorcycle stuntmen who used to make motorcycle videos by having one of them holding onto the back of a motorcycle on roller blades. You can really tell that they love motorcycles in a far more informed way than the last movie, which couldn't do much better than trying to suggest Easy Rider, which is notably not an action film. None of the action is realistic, but the subject matter clearly supports that sort of thing. These guys LOVE to use really obvious, cheesy camera effects, but they at least use them in pretty clever ways that actually fit into their story. A fight scene between the Rider and new villain Carrigan on the hood of an unnecessarily-moving car is made way better when the weird camera effects used for each character's supernatural powers are actually competing also.
Carrigan is a pretty decent villain for Ghost Rider, and he's not the only character in this that fits well into the mythos. None of them are written well, but they're CAST really well, and somehow, that seems to make up for it. Idris Elba obviously pisses excellence and his character is awesome, but the movie is loaded with cool actors doing cool stuff. Anthony Head shows up, and Christopher Lambert. None of them are very well fleshed out, but they LOOK cool, and that's kind of the language of the movie.
Ultimately, that's the main thing I took from this movie... that it's mostly a visual exercise in ridiculous super-hero-ey awesomeness. It's WAY better than the first movie, but that's really not hard to do. It's stupid and creepy and fun and weird... it's exactly what you want it to be.
Or at least, what I wanted it to be. :)
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