Somewhere in the middle of “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Ven geance,” Nicolas Cage pees flames. You read that right: The actor, famous for his questionably zany acting choices, goes into cuckoo overdrive, and urinating fire is just another box to tick on his loony-role checklist.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing — at least Cage seems to be immersed in the ecstatically delirious title role. The film thrives on his blazing pool of insanity, even if the story, acting and overall cheesiness results in a mess of a movie.
Directing duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (known to fans as Neveldine/Taylor), whose previous works include the equally frenetic “Crank” series, have little to count on other than the dive into lunacy taken by their leading man.
The story, for one, never takes form, and there’s little intrigue to be had within the central mystery. Something involving a demon-child and Johnny Blaze (Cage) trying to free himself of a curse barely provokes interest.
Cage has been quoted as saying there is a little bit of “The Da Vinci Code” mystery-solving in the script, but even by that novel’s loose standards and Tom Hanks’s hair, this sequel to the 2007 “Ghost Rider” falls short of a shrug. By the story’s end, the audience is hard-pressed to care about what demonic phenomenon does or does not occur.
Cage tries to infuse some personality into his alcoholic vagabond character Johnny Blaze, a former stunt-motorcyclist turned hellfire demon whose back-story is worthy of a Bruce Wayne-level of scrutiny.
This is, after all, a guy who made a bad deal with the devil for his dying father, the result being a still-dead father and a flaming skull for a head. But the story barely skips a beat before running off to the numerous action sequences.
The good and bad guys around Blaze don’t have much to offer either. There’s Fergus Riordan’s Danny, the child whose presence is the answer to all the questions hanging around the film (should you choose to indulge in a little elementary problem-solving). Riordan has little to do except switch between evil and nice-boy looks.
His mother, played by Italian singer-actress Violante Placido, has slightly more to do, but the script can’t decide whether to make her a tough sidekick or a damsel in distress.
The baddies — Ciaran Hinds as the devil and Johnny Whitworth as supervillain Blackout — are obviously talented, but they find no way to infuse any personality into their wooden characters, resulting in bad guys as interchangeable as the ones in the Rambo movies.
Respected English actor Idris Elba has some fun as Moreau, a French alcoholic priest and the film’s only character with enough traits to make up what might be called a “personality.”
Somewhere amid the sludge, Christopher Lambert has a small role as Methodius, a monk with a secret of his own and face tattoos that look like a wet Bible threw up on his face. The former “Highlander” actor seems to comprehend the puerile nature of his character, barely faking interest in trying to portray the monk with mysterious dignity.
This takes us back to the wild, wild Cage. Not since his feckless, effervescent turn in “The Wicker Man” remake has the actor looked more deranged in a role. Fortunately, what comes off as unintentional comedy in that film looks like blissful glee in “Spirit of Vengeance” (though admittedly there are some moments where Cage simply looks like an addict going cold turkey). The best thing that can be said about Cage’s performance is that there will be moments when you question whether what just transpired on screen was done with special effects, or if it was simply Cage’s really letting loose.
In the end, “Spirit of Vengeance” survives solely as a kind of cinematic freak show, with Cage as the main attraction. Everything else is utterly disposable. In the end I laughed at — or along with — Cage, providing enough entertainment to keep me awake. Let us just hope, for flaming-skull’s sake, that Cage is in on the joke.
If he isn’t, then Lord only knows how magnificent that “Drive Angry” sequel is going to be.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
Directed by Neveldine/Taylor
Starring Nicolas Cage, Ciaran Hinds, Violante Placido, Johnny Whitworth, Fergus Riordan and Idris Elba
95 minutes
English with Indonesian subtitles
