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Rider, if you can

Today, we bring you a review of David Goyer's script for Ghost Rider. We also have the tentative logo being used around the set of Catch Me If You Can. I wish all of you a good week. We'll be back later with some more good stuff...

Catchy Logo

Some more tid-bits from our dedicated scooper inside Stevie's new project:

The movie is half completed at this point. Background personnel have been bumped to the end of the month for shooting. This is the semi-official logo as of the last few days.

(Scoop sent by 'Agent TG'.)

Ghost Rider script review

"Howdy folks, John here with my thoughts on the June 2001 script for the movie Ghost Rider by David Goyer. Now first off, let me say that although my childhood was spent with my nose buried in Marvel comics much of the time, Ghost Rider was not a title I ever read. A quick check through the collection confirmed that fact, turning up not a single issue (but I'm pleased to see that my A-Team #1 is still looking good). So I can't really say how well this script adapts the story from the comic. What I do know of the comic is that it centered on one Johnny Blaze, a motorcycle stuntman who made a deal with Mephisto to spare Blaze's stepfather from a lethal disease in exchange for Blaze's soul. When his stepfather died in a stunt, Blaze refused Mephisto his soul, and his girlfriend helped him drive off the demon with an incantation. On the way out though, Mephisto grafted the Spirit of Vengeance onto Blaze's body. From then on, at night he transformed into Ghost Rider.

In the script, the origin is a bit different. Rather than a good guy who had an awful demon attached to him, Blaze is now a lifelong criminal. He was attempting to straighten out his life when an accident landed his pregnant wife in the hospital in critical condition. Desperate to save her, he makes a deal with a man called Ambrose Starke. Now his wife lives, although in a coma, and nightly Blaze transforms into the Spirit of Vengeance, which stalks the Earth looking for corrupt souls to claim. This is a fairly minor adjustment to the origin of the character but it does change how much sympathy we can feel for Blaze. Yes, his lot in life now is pretty bad but he's not exactly innocent either.

The script does not get off to an impressive start. We meet our main characters all at once, flashing back and forth between them as events bring them together. Over the top of this is a voice over that seems to know the story already. One character is Johnny Blaze, who roams the country searching for peace from his torment. Another is Billy Ray Carrigan, a thug hired to track down a Native American woman Nomi and her daughter Rain. Carrigan was hired because he and Nomi were once an item, so he should know her habits, making it easier to find her. He does find her eventually and he is about to beat her senseless before hauling her in when the Ghost Rider explodes upon the scene. He proceeds to decimate Carrigan's hired muscle before running him off. Nomi witnesses the exit of Blaze after reverting to form.

I mention that last bit because naturally the two meet up again and we find that Nomi knows all about the legends behind the Spirit of Vengeance and invites Blaze back to meet her grandfather, the wise old shaman straight out of Central Casting. This particular part of the script is pretty awful, nailing cliché after cliché to give a reason to put these two together.

Despite a rocky start, the script does eventually settle down and deliver the goods. By the goods, I mean violence and lots of it. When the Ghost Rider appears, very bad things happen to bad people. For example, consider a passage like "Thundering past like an Amtrak train, the Ghost Rider punches a flaming fist right through Albright's face." There are numerous action sequences where the Spirit of Vengeance is unleashed and, forgive the pun, all hell breaks lose. It's in these sections that the script comes to life with imaginative sequences that utilize the demon's abilities very nicely. Odds are the special effects budget for this movie will have to be enormous.

This is of course the stuff of summer blockbuster movies and like many previous examples of such films, the story is light on character and plot. The major characters are a motley lot of interest varying from mild to none at all. Blaze's motivation is ill defined, mostly through murky flashbacks that give him something of a back story. That makes it hard to tell just how long Blaze has suffered with this burden. Did it happen two weeks ago or has he been wandering the highways for years like this? There's no way to know. All we really know of him is that he's had a tough life, mostly of his own choosing. As a result, I found it a bit hard to be too concerned about his outcome. Nomi's character was kept pretty simple. She's no innocent either but her purpose in life is to protect her daughter, which makes her pretty easy to follow. Carrigan is a garden variety psychopath. Finally, the mysterious Starke isn't really even a character. He's just the bogeyman.

One thing that really bothered me late in the film was the persistence of the bad guys. They've had a chance to see the enormous damage that Ghost Rider can inflict on them and yet they continue to attack him. They never seem to catch on to the fact that they are facing a supernatural creature that will annihilate them with ease. It seems to me that most thugs would have turned tail and fled after seeing one of their buddies barbecued by a demon. I know having them attack and give chase makes for some great action sequences but I would have enjoyed them a lot more if I didn't keep wondering about the logic of it all.

Obviously, this script is fairly old and many changes could have occurred so I'm not too concerned at the moment. A solid rewrite could easily shore up the characters and fix a few of the annoyances. The action sequences are clearly the heart and soul of this script and should be retained. The film would be a definite R and might even have to be edited to avoid receiving an NC-17 rating. It's that violent. What really worries me is that many comic book movies are aimed at that annoying PG-13 rating. Bringing this script in under that rating would absolutely gut it of everything I liked. If that happens, it might not even be worth watching."

(Review submitted by John Shea.)

Stay tuned...

That's all folks...

Jean-François Allaire (aka DeadPool)

Questions, comments, praise etc. Email me at deadpool@tnmc.org

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Jean-François Allaire is TNMC's first columnist. At only 24 years old he has become a respected entertainment journalist, with his columns appearing in Corona's Coming Attractions and Scr(i)pt magazine. He also writes a monthly column in Screenwriters Monthly entitled 'The Last Word.' Hailing from Montreal this young writer is determined to dig up all the details on the movies before they hit your local theater. If you're part of a movie production then you really need to be talking to him.