Ghost Rider (2007)

In 2008, Robert Downey Jr. reentered the public eye as Tony Stark in “Iron Man,” the movie that launched 11 years worth of blockbusters, reinvigorated Marvel, and culminated in the most expansive crossover in the history of cinema.

One year prior, Nicholas Cage stared as Johnny Blaze in the unimpressive and largely forgettable “Ghost Rider” (2007).

Both Iron Man and Ghost Rider were Marvel comics characters, but the 2007 dumpster fire was made by Columbia Pictures, back when Marvel was selling off the cinematic rights for its movies in order to keep the comic book business alive. This is why Sony owns “Spiderman” and Fox owned “Fantastic 4,” “X-Men,” and “DeadPool.”

If you’ve never seen “Ghost Rider,” or you did but you’ve purged the viewing from your memory like your stomach purged an evening of too many margaritas, it was about a boy who sold his soul to the Devil (Peter Fonda) to save his father - Barton - from cancer.
Unlike the version of Lucifer we get from the show “Lucifer” (2015+) who would collect on deals and debts but was otherwise very honest, this Devil was conniving like a Djinni and very stupid.
The Devil took Johnny’s soul in exchange for Barton’s cancer survival, only to kill Barton in the next scene for no particularly good reason; after all, he’d already contractually obligated Johnny’s soul away, so killing Barton was unnecessarily shitty.
Because of the contract, Johnny became unwillingly immortal, so he did the most capitalist thing possible: become the ultimate motorcycle stunt rider. He attempted more and more dramatic jumps, usually failing in ways that would turn a normal man into a meat crayon, but always surviving because the Devil wouldn’t let him die.
14 years later, the Devil revisited Johnny to call in his debt, declaring Johnny to be his latest Ghost Rider, to handle case work on earth that he seemed otherwise inconvenienced to do himself.
In this case it was to kill his son, Blackheart (Wes Bentley), whom he might as well have just named “The Really Evil Bad Guy.”
It was never clarified how the Devil produced a son, or why the Devil couldn’t reign him in. In an attempt to cover that plot hole, Blackheart said Devil-affecting stuff didn’t work on him because he wasn’t “fallen,” which, fine, but I don’t think getting cast from Heaven gave the Devil a functioning set of genitalia, so that still didn’t answer the question.

The first time Johnny transformed into the Ghost Rider, it was at the command of the Devil with the explicit order to go kill Blackheart. So Johnny transformed and tore through the city because he was contractually obligated to do so.
But after that, all of his actions were entirely of his own volition, and nothing the Devil said could make him behave a certain way.
Oh, and Johnny could only transform at night for some reason, or when he found a particularly convenient shadow during the day.

So Johnny Blaze went out, killed some demons, pissed off the cops for whatever Texas city he was in that I don’t care to remember, and ultimately killed Blackheart.
Somewhere in there he was reunited with Roxy (Eva Mendes), his love interest from the same time when his dad died, to whom he was clearly still attracted but refused to settle down with even after he saved the day. Real-world answer is so that they could make a sequel; in-movie answer is that Johnny was an idiot and didn’t realize that he was as ugly as Nicholas Cage and that Roxy was lightyears out of his league.
He also met the Caretaker (Sam Elliot), the Ghost Rider from a past contract who was somehow still stuck on earth atoning for his sins, taking care of a graveyard. He told Johnny that the graveyard was sacred space and thus Blackheart and his demons couldn’t get to him there.
Because this movie hated following its own rules, Blackheart and his demons promptly beat up the Caretaker in the graveyard, explained away by Blackheart himself not being “fallen.”
And, as shown that the Devil could compel his Ghost Riders to do whatever he wanted, it’s unclear why the Devil didn’t just mandate that the Caretaker finish whatever his last task was.

The macguffin required to turn Johnny into the Ghost Rider was stated to be his proximity to evil. He transformed when near Blackheart, his demons, and a random mugger in an alley yet he never transformed when the Devil appeared.
I got that the Ghost Rider was an anti-hero and we needed to root for him for the sake of the movie, but as an agent of the Devil, he had an inappropriately strong moral code. And despite being a giant flaming skeleton immune to any kind of damage, he never once hurt an innocent person, even by accident.
For a movie that wanted to portray the Devil as evil, they did a pretty poor job at it - not once did they show him using any component of his powers to hurt or tempt someone who didn’t deserve it… except for killing Barton.

It was never satisfactorily stated why or how the Devil could give Johnny the power to take down Blackheart but couldn’t do it himself.
And, after Johnny had killed Blackheart, the Devil said he would give Johnny’s soul back and take away the Rider powers. Johnny politely declined and the Devil was just okay with it, for some reason.
Because the plot demanded it, Johnny’s contract with the Devil was partially and inconsistently mitigated because he sold his soul to help his dad, which apparently meant that he somehow got God’s blessing too (???), because he sold it for a good reason, not a greedy one.
Don’t think too hard about that.

The special effects were terrible, especially from a big-budget studio like Columbia, and even more so compared to the amazing Iron Man suit that would get rendered into existence one year later.

The soundtrack wasn’t bad - there was some classic rock and a few cowboy pieces that might play right before a shootout at the OK Corral, but nothing that I want to listen to repeatedly

The beginning of the movie opened ~15 years before the main act, where we saw Young Johnny (Matt Long) and Young Roxy (Raquel Alessi), both of whom had the right gender and skin color of the actors they ‘arew up’ to be. Megan thought Alessi was a good choice to mirror Mendes, and while I agree, it paled in comparison to the Gabriel/Mendes casting choice from “The Spirit” (2008).

When the movie ended, Megan said “Well I didn’t gain anything from that.”
This wasn’t good.
It really wasn’t.
It’d be tolerable if you brought a few friends over and/or made fun of it together while drinking, which is what Megan and I were doing while we watched, saving it from a 1-Claw at the time, but not for its actual rating.
But truly, what’s so mind-bending about how bad this was is its terribleness in one-year proximity to the launch of the impossibly successful Marvel Cinematic Universe.