Ghost Rider

When I was talking superhero movies yesterday, I forgot to mention how much I enjoyed Ghost Rider when I came across it on tv the other week. I was expecting it to be pretty bad, but ended up really enjoying it, so it makes my list of fun, but not great, comic book superhero movies. Strange, bad, funny performances by Nicolas Cage as flaming skullhead stunt biker and Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles (!).

But what was really the big revelation was that Ghost Rider completes the Sam Elliott trilogy, begun with the cheesy Patrick Swayze fightin' bartender actioner Roadhouse, and continued with The Big Lebowski, which needs no further comment from me. The Great Sam Elliott Trilogy consists of three films where he plays very similar mysterious/supernatural/badass/wryfull stranger characters. Nobody does it better. Lebowski, of course, is the best movie of the three, and I might rank Ghost Rider just a shade better than Roadhouse, but I withhold final judgment on that until I can see Ghost Rider a few more times, since I've probably seen the other two in their entirety about a half dozen times and have seen them in part a whole lot more n that. "More n that." See, I'm starting to sound like Sam Elliott.