Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

I love Nicolas Cage.  He's a gifted actor who can play it straight, as we saw in Leaving Las Vegas, but who seems to feel most at home going over the top.  Some may see his performances as so many antic pantomimes, but I think Cage has the unique ability to channel and express pure, unadulterated id.

Thus, I present to you Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, an international production that seems to have been created for the sole purpose of fleecing as many foreign investors as possible.  I loved the first Ghost Rider, feeling that Cage's crazy eyes alone were worth the price of admission.  In this iteration, Cage's Johnny Blaze lives in a place labelled "Eastern Europe," but which could only be Bulgaria (Which leads one to wonder, why not have the subtitle simply read Bulgaria?  Would that be too confusing?).  He's a hermit, fighting his ghost rider - hood like a deadly addiction.  But then Idris Elba shows up to make him a deal.  I'm here to tell you, when Idris Elba offers you a deal, you take it.

The deal?  Oh, it's it's some mumbo-jumbo about an ancient prophecy (one of the laziest screenwriting tropes of them all), a sacrificial child who must be saved, and the Devil (Ciaran Hinds, having a great time).  Did I mention that the child has a fetching mother with a cute Bulgarian accent?  Or that her ex is a demon of decay who can only eat twinkies (Hey, I laughed.)?

Why bother with all this setup?  Well, two hours of Cage in a studio making crazy eyes at the camera sounds great in theory, but a little narrative structure, some scenery, and a few gags make for a much more interesting mix.  And all this does its job, but let's face it:  you came for the id.  You came for the crazy eyes, and Cage delivers in spades.  He doesn't overact so much as überact (I'm telling you, when you can make Christopher Lambert look like a restrained thespian, you're on to something.).  His Johnny Blaze carries the crazy just below the surface.  When it starts to break through and transform him into the Rider, the film uses a clever combination of (first-rate) CGI and no-limits acting to give us the joy of letting go and letting our fires burn.

Bottom line: this movie is fantastic.  Even if it only served as an excuse for actors you like to ham it up, it'd work.  The fact that it lets the great Nicholas Cage cut loose in a symphony of 'splosions and loud music makes it that much better.  I dare you to watch Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance without a great big smile plastered across your face.  This is an exuberant, wacky, gloriously unrestrained time at the movies.  I give it two big, burning, skeletal thumbs up.

3:10 to Yuma

3:10 TO YUMA is both a fine western and a sad commentary on the current state of the western.

James Mangold has crafted a fine western with an extraordinary cast, featuring two of the finest leading men in pictures today: Christian Bale and Russell Crowe. The men sell antagonism, respect, and something approaching friendship, and I enjoyed watching the development of their relationship over the course of the film. The film itself has nearly everything one can expect from a western, including evil water barons, post- Civil War hostility, Apaches on the raid, and the impending changes brought on by rail travel. It also features some decent western stuntwork, but it's this very stuntwork that makes 3:10 TO YUMA a sad commentary on the current state of its genre. Where are the horses trained to fall and tumble? Where are the stuntmen trained to ride them? For that matter, where are the stuntmen trained to hop from horse to horse, or carry out any of the other feats we've come to expect as followers of the genre? I think that 3:10 TO YUMA tried to provide us with some of those thrills; but its genre has seemed unprofitable for so long that modern stuntmen simply aren't building the skills necessary to pull off first-class western stunts.

And that's too bad, because the western genre still has so much to offer. 3:10 TO YUMA, while a remake, stays fresh, compelling, and exciting up to the very end. Though it stumbles with a leaden confession late in the game, it delivers fine western action and he-man pathos throughout. It's more TOMBSTONE than OPEN RANGE, and that's ok. Here's a movie that just wants to entertain us, and it succeeds.

{hesitates ... hesitates ... aw, to heck with it}

Catch this movie.