Ghost Rider: Critic Reviews

So much flatter than it was on the comic-book page.

Is the world ready for a flaming Nicolas Cage?

It's ridiculous, likable, with some pleasing reminders of the Blade movies.

Mainly the movie's about riding a bike at the speed of sound while your head is burning. They can do anything these days, which isn't quite the same as saying they should do anything these days.

Ghost Rider is the kind of movie that's great stupid fun as long as someone else is buying the tickets.

The blank, frenetic exhaustion of the final reel acts like a kid who tries to snap out of a candy-binge coma by snorting lines of Pixy Stix.

Rarely in Hollywood have so many labored so hard with so much time and such financial resources to fill a movie screen with as vast an array of spiritual gibberish, literary poppycock and pure flummery as Mark Steven Johnson's Ghost Rider.

Neither contemptuous of its audience nor merely stupid, Ghost Rider's nonsensical histrionics are an almost perfect mirror of its comic-book source.

The story doesn't arc so much as unspool like a stretch of desert highway, but the Ghost Rider is such a powerful amalgam of hot-rod iconography that this is still fairly watchable.

Ghost Rider isn't good but if you catch the spirit of it, it's not terrible.

Provides just enough pop thrills and slam-bang action to make it perfectly acceptable matinee fare.

Ghost Rider would have been most fun had it been made for a dime by a Roger Corman-type outfit as a quickie Gothic adventure spinning Zane Grey, Faust and Evel Knievel.

The movie could have been saved, though, if it had cut the puns of the kind that made us all flee Batman and Robin.

Ghost Rider is a joke -- a monumentally foolish comic book movie with lots of unintentional laughs, mixed in with the intentional ones.

...damned if this one shouldn't make your so-bad-it's-good list...

An unholy mess.

This comic book adaptation is likely to flame out fast.

The real evil in this flick isn't Blackheart (Wes Bentley), the devil's son, it's the soul-sucking devil of modern cinema: Hollywood formula.

The worst adaptation of a Marvel Comics hero yet.

Cage needs to produce something special next to make up for crimes against cinema.

By any real-world standard, this is a stupid piece of junk. But it's very good at being a stupid piece of junk.

It's far from a masterpiece.

If Nicolas Cage weren't a goofball with a hunky physique and droll wit, this Marvel-comic-to-big-screen adaptation would have no torque at all.

Seeing Ghost Rider is like going to Saturday matinee serials at the Rialto eons ago. It's a fanciful, puerile experience -- a fun day out for 9-year olds. Ghost Rider is a ridiculous melange of cheesy effects, talentless extras, corny plot and insi

Johnson might have diverted some of his CGI budget to hire a writer to come up with a story with some internal logic -- then he could match the effects to the story rather than vice versa.