What do you do when you want to make a salad, and you’ve got some red onions, some carrots, a few olives, but instead of lettuce you’ve got a big pile of crap? Mix it up as much as you want but the main ingredient is still crap. That’s exactly what Nicky Cage and his hairpiece riding a flaming motorcycle out of Hell in the newest “Ghost Rider” was like. It really seems like they tried to do some things that were interesting to the movie (which I’ll address), but it really just ended up putting some nice window dressing on an otherwise horrible film.

Of course, the characters are awful and flat. That’s not the point. You can’t take a movie like this and hold it up to the standard of good film-making because, let’s be honest here, it just won’t hold up.

Nic Cage is Johnny Blaze, ex-stuntman (Really, what else could you do with a name like Johnny Blaze? Stunts or porn are really your only career choices with a name like that. I don’t think he’d ever be Johnny Blaze, CPA) hiding out in Eastern Europe to avoid letting his demonic Ghost Rider out and killing folks. Cage really plays up his I’m-a-crazy-guy-that-yells-a-lot-in-high-pitched-tones thing to death in this movie. OK, we get it; that was all right in “Face/Off,”@@http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119094/@@ now give it a rest. It’s almost sad to see him do roles like this considering his awesome performances in “Raising Arizona” and “Leaving Las Vegas.”

The other characters don’t really mean anything. There’s the kid everybody is trying to get their hands on because he’s the child of the devil or something, and Christopher I-can’t-believe-he-found-work-after-“Highlander” Lambert (“Highlander” was awesome, by the way) plays some weird face-tattooed priest who also wants to protect the kid from the devil, but we’re never told why he has tattoos on his face, or why the priests live in some sort of weird cave complex out in the middle of the Eastern Bloc somewhere.@@it’s the eastern bloc, what do you expect?@@ Like I said before, the plot and characters aren’t the best parts of this movie. I’m not sure there are any best parts of this movie. No, wait. There are two.

Best Part Number One is that you get to see the Ghost Rider urinating fire for two seconds. Yes, you read that right. That was a good part of the movie. Two seconds.
Best Part Number Two is the idea that the devil can’t do his freaky devil-magic often while inhabiting human bodies because the power of his evil devil-magic is too much for the human body to withstand, and they deteriorate during the process. That was a cool concept. But it may have been ripped off of the television show “Supernatural.”

These two things don’t make the film worth watching.

Oh yeah, it was also in 3-D, which every movie that comes out is trying to do. It’s another reason to jack up the price and get people in theater seats. It wasn’t filmed in 3-D, but the effect was applied in post-production. That isn’t true 3-D. True 3-D needs to be filmed with special 3-D cameras made for that purpose. If it’s applied after the fact, you get a lackluster effect — as you see in “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.”
To sum up, this movie was pure schlock. You’d be better off paying the $9 to somebody who could use the money for a kick in the groin. OK, maybe it wasn’t that bad. A poke in the eye, maybe. Not the worst movie of the year (the bar has been set rather high … er… low for that one), but it isn’t worth seeing unless you don’t have to pay for it, and you have nothing else to do. By that, I mean absolutely nothing. Watching paint dry is something, and therefore doesn’t count.
Grade: D+/C-