Nic Cage Is Right - Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Has Aged Better Than You Think
Fifteen years since we last saw that flaming skull-headed vigilante motorbiking across cinema screens, we finally have word that a new Ghost Rider movie is coming.
While the character already exists in the MCU (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s incarnation of Robbie Reyes), Ghost Rider’s lack of prominence on the small screen and complete absence on the big one has been as hard to ignore as his Penance Stare. That streak is set to end with the surprising SDCC 2026 announcement that Ryan Gosling will be suiting up for a new film directed by his Star Wars: Last Starfighter collaborator, and Deadpool film steward, Shawn Levy.
Those of us who can mentally identify with the ‘84 years’ Titanic meme will remember that the last actor to portray Marvel’s vengeful crusader was Nic Cage. The noted superhero stan played the character in 2007’s Ghost Rider and 2011’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, the former of which included Gosling’s then-future wife, Eva Mendes, as Johnny Blaze’s love interest. The first film holds a 28% / 48% critical and audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, while the second has an even more dismal 18% / 31%.
I’m not here to tell you either is actually a misunderstood cinematic masterpiece just for the clicks. But having just rewatched both movies in the wake of the Gosling news, I will earnestly advocate that they are far from unwatchable; in fact, Spirit of Vengeance, the most reviled of the pair, happens to be the more stylistically interesting and appropriately darker, thanks to a directing duo that gave us Jason Statham’s Crank duology. And I’m not the only one who thinks the maligned Ghost Rider sequel isn’t as bad as most remember it.
Nic Cage is a Spirit of Vengeance Defender
As a fan of the comic books from childhood and the star of the films, obviously, Nic Cage’s opinion is heavily biased. However, actors don’t always go out of their way to even acknowledge, let alone praise, some of the arguable ‘stinkers’ in their back catalogue: Anna Kendrick, for example, appeared to forget she was ever in the Twilight Saga, which helped launch her career, while James Corden and Rebel Wilson gleefully threw the entire VFX team of Cats under the bus before the film’s corpse was even cold.
Cage, however, an actor whose film and TV credits are well over the 100 mark, not only remembers he was in two Ghost Rider movies (a good start), but has a sympathetically pragmatic take on why they weren’t successful. In a 2018 career retrospective he gave to Yahoo!, he explained: “The problem is, it's very hard to take a family of children to a movie — and they made it a PG-13 movie — about a superhero who, oh, by the way, also happens to have sold his soul to Satan. So it's not going to be the most commercial concept or vehicle. But it certainly is the most interesting, and the most thought-provoking. I think if you look back on the movies today, they age well.”
He adds: “Had Ghost Rider been made in R-rated format, the way they had the guts to do with Deadpool, and they did it again today, I'm fairly certain it would be enormously successful. That said, I still think the movies were a hit. People don't look at the subsidiary outlets, like DVD and streaming and whatnot. When you look at what Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor did [on Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance] for $50 million, and they got a $250 million return, you begin to see the genius of the sequel.”
From what I can gather, Cage isn’t quite on the money: Spirit’s budget was reportedly between $57-75 million (marketing costs are unclear). Globally, it pulled in around $149 million at the box office, and went on to earn a combined $18 million in DVD and Blu-ray sales. Based on this, the movie did a little better than break even, which makes it neither a huge hit nor a total flop. However, this doesn’t account for streaming earnings, as Cage also mentions, which remain a closely guarded industry secret.
Numbers aside, I think he’s right that the movies have aged well for what they were and the time period they were made – in the same vein as the ‘00s Fantastic Four and Daredevil films. I’ll even throw Elektra in there, a surprisingly introspective, character-driven story about picking up the pieces of one’s life after it’s supposedly ended. But let’s keep the focus on the Rider.
What Spirit of Vengeance Gets Right About Ghost Rider
In the first Ghost Rider movie, Cage’s Johnny Blaze is an absolute weirdo – and I mean that derogatively. Despite being a famous daredevil, as per the character’s comic book roots, outside of work, Blaze is a buttoned-up singleton who loves monkey documentaries and ‘drinking’ jellybeans from a Martini glass. This isn’t to say that people who are single, like monkies, or are T-total are intrinsically ‘weird’, but the way Cage plays this meeker side of the character – clearly intended to contrast with the unbridled nature of the Rider – is a bizarre approximation of normal human behaviour. “Classic Cage”, you may think, recalling his infamous Wicker Man and Vampire’s Kiss outbursts; however, I’d categorise his first stab at Ghost Rider as a Cage performance that can neither decide on normalcy nor caricature, and as a result, we end up with something impenetrably muddled.
In the same Yahoo! interview, Cage described Ghost Rider as a “fairy tale”, and I think this perspective is important to keep in mind to appreciate the film’s better qualities: that Faustian bargain Blaze makes as a young man – selling his soul to the Devil (Mephisto) to save his dying father, only to be inevitably screwed over by Marvel’s King of Hell and forced to be his fiery servant – is accompanied by a monster-maiden romance subplot, and a bright, poppy visual sensibility. It’s an even more heightened sense of reality than the aforementioned Fantastic Four movies of the same era.
In the hands of Neveldine and Taylor, however, Cage majorly course-corrects his performance, as do the directors with the series in general. Made five years after the first film, Spirit of Vengeance ignores its predecessor with an altered origin story, no Eva Mendes, and a Johnny Blaze who vacillates between world-weary antihero and barely-contained mania (and crucially, no jellybean cocktails). Even the character’s design is better: the smooth egg-white of the skull in the first film smacked too much of CGI; in Spirit, it’s weathered, angular, and more expressive. His leather biker suit, meanwhile, is cracked and melted. It's all more textual, more considered.
This personality follows into the fight sequences, where the Rider cracks his flaming chain whip — and jokes — with much more flair and levity. Fearful reactions to his extreme appearance, which mostly come from actual regular human baddies as opposed to unimpressed members of the underworld, imbue a character whose signature move is to scare the soul out of you with suitable menace, too. Let’s not forget: this is an unkillable guy with a flaming skull for a head. He’s supposed to be scary-cool; he's supposed to be an unstoppable, supernatural force of judge, jury and executioner.
Rather than the bright lights of Texas and run-ins with a bunch of demons who looked like they failed their auditions for The Lost Boys, Spirit is set in the (cheaper) arid backdrop of Eastern Europe, replete with scorched earth and crumbling monasteries. Ciaran Hinds is a far stronger Big Daddy Devil presence than Peter Fonda, while a French-accented Idris Elba steals every scene as a crusading monk. The plot revolves around the antichrist prophecy, giving Blaze something meatier to brood over than a high school sweetheart.
While it is a jarring departure from what audiences measurably liked a little more in the first film, this is a version of Ghost Rider that manages to get a bit darker and weirder without locking younger audiences out. Imagine a slightly more family-friendly Constantine, and that’s even with two cutaways to Ghost Rider urinating fire. (I will add, however, that its treatment of female characters is troublesome: there’s barely a woman on screen, especially Cage’s co-star, Violante Placido, who isn’t abused in some way, and has that abuse brushed off as deserved, justified, or unavenged in the moment.)
Stylistically, what Nevaldine and Taylor uniquely add to their Ghost Rider is what I can only imagine bagged them the job from their Crank days. Those adrenaline-pumped fever dreams feature Jason Statham (Chev Chelios) trapped in a biological Speed quandary: he can’t let his heart rate dip below a certain BPM, meaning that while he’s tearing his way through Los Angeles looking for the cure, he’s consuming and doing everything he can to maintain that dangerously high number, from drugs to driving to fighting to public sex. The directing duo visually complement this mad sprint with innovative, guerrilla-style filming, not only showing how fast Statham is constantly going, but what that mania feels like. They rigged small HD camcorders to moving bullet-time rigs, carried them while rollerskating, and even strapped them to remote-control cars. The editing, meanwhile, with its split-screens, wipe-outs and text inserts, is as if Edgar Wright edited Star Wars on speed.
The clearest throughline between Crank and Spirit of Vengeance is the POV sequence of Blaze transforming into Ghost Rider on his motorbike, Cage shifting frenetically between pain and laughter as the force inside him fights to take over. His face remains locked in centre-frame while the world around him rushes past, emphasising the transformation while maintaining a sense of motion. Like Statham’s Chev Chelios pumping his heart rate up, it really delivers the feeling of turning into a flaming demon on wheels rather than just the aesthetics of it, and perfectly matches that quintessential brand of unhinged Cage. I’d file this with the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer under the niche category of underrated ‘00s adaptations of comic/anime characters who like to go fast that understood the assignment even if the rest of the world didn’t.
It’s a shame that the film’s poor reception may have put a nail in Nevaldine and Taylor’s promising partnership. The two parted ways afterwards, though Taylor has continued to produce interesting work on his own, including collaborations with acclaimed comic book author Grant Morrison and making the most recent Hellboy film, The Crooked Man – yet another overlooked adaptation, IMO.
If Gosling and Levy are raiding the Rider’s past for inspiration for their 2028 film, I hope that at the very least, the most kinetic parts that the sadly short-lived duo brought to Spirit of Vengeance make it onto their mood board.
