Marvel‘s Ghost Rider is one of those characters who has always been far cooler in concept than in execution. From his inception in 1972, this character, who could have served in any capable writer’s hands as a meaty, juicy angst-generator, powering page after page of gritty Good vs. Evil drama, has instead suffered through 40 years of stories composed almost entirely from corn and cheese. As evidence, I submit this official character summary, which reeks of Gouda and is rife with retconning.

In 2007, Marvel kicked out the first Ghost Rider, a gloriously over-the-top explosion-fest featuring Nick Cage in a trademark psychotic performance and co-starring Eva Mendez‘s cleavage. Outside of the cast and crew, I’m pretty sure my boyfriend and I are the only two people on Earth who actually enjoyed this movie. This movie not only embraced Ghost Rider’s cheesy history, it grabbed that history by the shoulders, fed it a box of cheap wine, threw it down in front of a roaring fire, and made mad, passionate love to it. Folks, this movie was horribly, wonderfully, amazingly melodramatic and corny, and made all the better for Nick Cage’s pure, refined, adrenaline-driven insanity. Let’s reminisce for a second:

When news of a Ghost Rider sequel, again starring Nick Cage, broke, I was gleeful. When the trailers and sneak peeks started showing up online, I was ecstatic. This thing looked like aged sharp cheddar, y’all, like Brian Taylor took everything that made the first movie awesome, applied a giant budget and twice the gorgeous Nick Cage crazy we’ve all come to know and love, and turned out a bigger, badder, more explosive version of the first movie. I mean, look at this thing:

But it wasn’t bigger and badder. In fact – and it breaks my heart to say this – it was terrible. The story was a white-hot mess. The characters were cardboard cutouts. Even Nick Cage didn’t deliver on the crazy. About the only good thing I can say for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is that the soundtrack was pretty kick ass and the FX were fantastic.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance | Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 95 minutes | Genre: Action / Fantasy / Thriller

The plot here is wafer thin, and what there is of it is badly realized. The sad part about this is you can see the bones of a really interesting plot within the elements presented. I don’t know if the movie was a victim of bad editing or what, but all the coolest bits of plot are trimmed away to next to nothing, leaving this incredibly trite and over-done Antichrist storyline.

The supporting characters are cookie-cutter stereotypes. We get your standard Bad Girl With The Heart Of Gold, in the form of Violante Placido‘s gypsy Nadya, AKA the Devil’s baby-mama. You’ve got your Drunk Preacher Bad Ass in Idris Elba‘s Moreau, who could have been awesome, and is instead relegated to a bunch of cliche crap dialogue and one cool stunt at the beginning of the film. Peter Fonda, who played Mephistopheles (one of Marvel’s many Satan stand-in characters), has been replaced by Ciaran Hinds, losing anything even vaguely related to class and intimidation value, and who we’re now calling “Roarke” because… well, if you figure that out, let me know.

Also, Christopher Lambert has a cameo, and it’s required by law that if Christopher “the Highlander” Lambert is in your movie, he must have five solid minutes of stone-cold onscreen bad-assery (much like if Liam Neeson is in your movie, he must give the “I will hunt you down and kill you” speech). What Christopher Lambert is certainly not required to do is die like a little punk thirty seconds after being introduced.

The difference between a movie that is awesomely bad and a movie that is merely bad is subjective and hard to define. One man’s treasure is another man’s trash and all that. However, if I had to take a stab at it, I’d say the difference lies in intentions. The first Ghost Rider was written as a love letter to the character. It embraced the character’s past, thorns and all, didn’t take itself too seriously, and even if you didn’t like it, you had to at least admit that it looked like everyone was having fun. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance tried too hard. It wanted to be darker and edgier, it wanted to be dramatic, it wanted to be serious. And while Garth Ennis has proved in the past that Ghost Rider can, in fact, be all those things, he really can’t be those things with Nick Cage as a lead and Brian “Crank” Taylor directing. To try for it only resulted in a sad failure.

After watching her parents murdered by a mugger in a back alley, Marci Sischo grew up vowing to become the world's greatest detec -- wait, that's Batman. Theorizing that one could time travel within her own lifetime, Marci Sischo stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished -- no, no. That's Dr. Sam Beckett. Drat. Marci Sischo grew up in northern Michigan, and moved to Oregon in 2009. Yes! She's the Commuter's webmaster, pursuing a journalism degree at LBCC, and in her dwindling spare time, she's co-authoring an urban fantasy novel. You can stalk Marci at her blog, on Twitter, at Facebook, and on Google+.