A few years back ol’ Nicholas Cage became Ghost Rider in a not-so-great but not-completely-unwatchable film adaptation of the Marvel character. Well, as you’ve probably heard Marvel felt it did well enough to have a second go at the character so the hired the directing team of Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine (the guys who brought us Crank and Crank: High Voltage) and said, “Make an action-centric sequel using lots of slow motion.”
We now have our first look at this follow up to Ghost Rider via the trailer below. No word yet on if Nicholas Cage will appear without his shirt on again with CG “enhanced” muscle definition since he apparently can’t be bothered to hit the gym.
So yeah. There it is. I am honestly at a loss of words. I’m not the world’s biggest Ghost Rider fan by any sense of the imagination, so I’ll leave it up to you readers to provide thoughts on the actual treatment of the character. From my point of view, looks like it will at most be a fun action-filled popcorn flick, but I doubt anyone is expecting this to be even close to the caliber of other Marvel hero films. You can definitely see the influences of the new directors, especially if you have seen either of the Crank films (Read: Lots of ludicrous action scenes and slow motion). It might just be me but I can’t exactly discern a clear plot out of this trailer, it just looked like a lot of action cut together with some vague voice-0vers. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance may end up being a step above its predecessor, but I don’t think that’s saying much.
We will all be able to cast out geeky verdicts upon Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance when it hits theaters on February 17, 2012.
PS – Swallowing bullets and spitting them back? Kind of lame. Ghost Rider pissing fire? Definitely lame.
Sound off in the comments below on what you think of the first trailer for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance!