Ghost Rider (2007)

"Mooooo!"

I hadn't seen this film until last night hit my expectations we’re not high. The film doesn’t seem to be well-regraded, Nicolas Cage is certainly a very Marmite actor, and Mark Steven Johnson was personally responsible for the crime against cinema that was Daredevil. Having seen it, though, I can’t see much wrong with it and enjoyed it a lot. It’s not up there with the very best but is a perfectly good film.

I suppose the DVD cover didn’t help matters- the quote used praised the film for its special effects, which usually indicates a well-polished turd. Yet the effects are indeed superb here- Ghost Rider looks amazing and the transformation scenes are extraordinary- but the stench of faecal matter is very much absent. There’s a solid script, for a start, making Johnny a sympathetic and well-rounded character and achieving that surprisingly rare trick of making an origin story entertaining. It’s broadly faithful to the comic books, although there’s no mention of Zarathos.

One place they can’t, and shouldn’t be faithful, of course, is with the character of Mephisto, a strange Marvel sort-of-the-Devil-but-not-quite character. For cinematic purposes he has to be treated as a more traditional devil type, and Peter Fonda is magnificent. It’s also a good idea to use Blackheart as the main villain, plot-wise at least. But perhaps stealing the limelight is the splendid Sam Elliott as Carter Oage, the Ghost Rider of the old West who gets one last ride.

This is a satisfying way to spend 100 minutes, a hugely entertaining film. I genuinely don’t understand the hate. Yes, Nic Cage is, er, Nic Cage, And his acting style is certainly unorthodox. But surely he’s perfectly appropriate here...? Received wisdom can be weird.

Blade (1998)

“You may wake up one day and find yourself extinct."

 It's strange to think that this is such an early Marvel film. In fact, prior to this the only feature films had been the bizarrely underrated Howard the Duck, The Punisher and the low budget, no star straight-to-video '90s films Captain America and Fantastic Four, both rather obscure. And that was it. Until Blade came along, failed to wow the critics but was a huge success. Not long after came X-Men and Marvel films were everywhere, many of them sadly at Fox.

So how does it stand up, twenty years on? Pretty well, actually. Yes, wooden Wesley Snipes is phoning it in with a character that could have offered a lot of potential to a good actor, and has no charisma. Yet the script- by no less than David S. Goyer- is superb, and the film looks great, even if the cinematography has inevitably dated; from the perspective of 2018 there's more than a little of the late '90s music video vibe. It looks great, though, with impressive CGI.

We begin with a great set piece at a vampire rave that dates the film enormously, yes, but also shows us what Blade can do and his mission in a visually exciting way. N'Bushe Wright convinces as the doctor who is unwittingly drawn into this vampire fighting world, and Kris Kristofferson is superb as the grizzly and gnarled mentor figure.

This is not like the comics; Blade has been made into a kind of half-vampire for some reason, and the vampire mythos here is not quite the same, but it's nice to see Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan being credited.It's an entertaining two hours, though, and perhaps the real start of our current Marvel cinematic age.