Ghost Rider The Spirit of Vengeance (2011)

Megan thought the first “Ghost Rider” (2007) was so bad that she wanted to watch the sequel, to see just how much worse it could be.
We were pleasantly surprised about being wrong.

There are rare, weird times when the sequel to a movie is magnitudes better than the original.
Somehow, “Ghost Rider: The Spirit of Vengeance” (2011) pulled it off.
It helps that it wasn’t just a sequel, but a soft-reboot. Despite still using Nicholas Cage to play the protagonist Johnny Blaze again, this movie tried very hard to pretend that the first one didn’t happen.

For starters: the opening scene of the movie was a five-minute animated monologue of Johnny explaining that he’d sold his soul to the Devil (Ciarán Hinds) in exchange for his father’s life.
That’s it. That’s all it took to catch the audience up for the entire 2-hour mess that was the first movie. In fact, if you’d never seen “Ghost Rider” in the first place, this would have been an outstanding introduction.
On top of that, this movie gave us some desperately needed exposition: Apparently Johnny wasn’t inhabited by a demon or a curse from the Devil, but by an angel who’d followed Lucifer during the rebellion, betrayed him on behalf of Yahweh, led Heaven’s ‘Black Ops’(???), then led a rebellion of his own and finally got cast down to Hell. Said angel was now a fallen angel, and thus a bit of an anti-hero.
Not that any of that is cannon in any part of Christianity, but it has a definite comic book feel to it that explains why Johnny isn’t a rampaging hate-monster.
Beyond that, we learned that the Devil couldn’t simply visit Earth - any time he wanted to come up, he had to inhabit the body of a human, which both limited his powers and made him mortally weak, which was why he kept tasking other people to do his bidding. Doesn’t really explain why he’d put a fallen angel in someone with the intent of doing his dirty work though.

This movie took place in the decidedly ambiguous realm of “Eastern Europe,” which used what appeared to be a German castle, an Italian hospital, a Romanian ambulance, and a bunch of American henchmen as set pieces.
The German castle was actually a heavily armored and defended monastery of an unknown sect of Christianity that used the greatest technologies available to track a potential son of the Devil. Because obviously.
Oh, yeah. Son of the Devil. They brought back the idea that Lucifer had a son. At least this time it was a kid whose soul he claimed from a pregnant, drug-addicted, crime-involved mother (Violante Placido), instead of an inexplicable spawned-entity-thing from the last try.

So the monastery monks were tracking young Danny (Fergus Riordan) to make sure he couldn’t get captured by the Devil’s very-human henchmen, who wanted to use him in a ceremony on a very specific day to allow the essence of the Devil into his body and turn him into the King of Earth and Destroyer of Worlds and whatnot.
It was basically Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimans’ Good Omens/“Good Omens” (1990/2019), but with one fallen angel instead of one angel and one demon.

The Devil also infected hitman Carrigan (Johnny Whitworth) with the essence of decay, which was a novel trick; whatever he touched rotted away in his hands, like a really gross Midas touch.

Idris Elba was in this too. He played the Frenchman “Moreau,” who drank vinegar and died, so that was weird.

Because the movie didn’t waste it’s entire first act on an overly dramatic telling of Johnny’s origin or waste any amount of minutes on a love sub-plot that didn’t go anywhere, it had plenty of time to show us what the Ghost Rider could actually do.
For example: any vehicle the Ghost Rider sat in became a flaming hell-machine for which he could wreak havoc. Mostly that was his motorcycle, but he also took over a massive digging machine and a couple of large trucks, all of which caught on fire immediately and promptly stopped following many of the laws of physics.
The animation for Ghost Rider was noticeably better this time around, as his body was actually proportioned to Cage’s frame instead of looking like an abnormally tiny skull on Dwane Johnson’s body.

Neither movie named the Devil as “the Devil” for some reason, which is weird, because it wasn’t exactly a secret as to who he was, so I don’t know the point of trying to pretend it wasn’t him.

Overall the CGI was better. I realize that animation and rendering gets better with time, but the four years between 2007 and 2011 don’t account for the progress - just Columbia Studio’s willingness to actually cough up the money for a decent render farm this time around.
There were some scenes of cars crashing that were pretty bad, but “Inception” (2010) had some of those too, so I won’t give this too much crap for it.

The soundtrack was nothing special. It fit, but it wasn’t anything to write home about.
There was one piece, however, that felt like a cross between ACDC’s “Kashmir” and “The Avengers Main Theme,” but they couldn’t get the rights to the former and the latter hadn’t officially been released yet. It played two or three times, so I kept hearing it and expecting it to continue on in one of two ways.

I imagine this being moderately good was a side effect of the MCU not only starting, but becoming rapidly and unprecedentedly successful in the years between “Iron Man” (2008) and “The Avengers” (2012) on the horizon.
This also seems to be the only movie ever made under the “Marvel Knight” studio header, so I don’t know what that was supposed to be or how many other flicks were supposed to be made by that failed venture.

While the first movie was incredibly bad, as it came from an era where studios could get away with doing whatever they damn well pleased with comic book rights, this one came along at a time when studios were far more beholden to telling the story that the comics told, which meant there were years and years of development and refinement in the narrative background of this, versus a team of coked-up writers who wrote the former.
The scriptwriters even managed to cram in a few jokes without making any one character seem like the comic relief idiot.
I’m actually giving this movie a 3-Claw rating because I don’t feel like I wasted my time watching it from the comfort of my couch.
I will happily recommend it as a movie worth spending some time on while we’re all stuck in quarantine.