Oh god. Oh my god.
Can I get a mongoose noise anytime I swear?
Okay, one, what does a mongoose sound like?
I don't know.
I didn't know mongoose were so indecisive.
It's true.
Yeah.
Hello and welcome to Cage Match,
colon a roundabout way of meeting Nicolas Cage.
I am your host, Sean.
I remembered my own name this week
with my co-host, Nick, who also remembered his own name this week.
It's true.
I came in prepared with it.
I wrote it down.
On your arm.
Yeah.
And our good friend and producer.
Peter.
I almost fucked that up.
You're like, who am I?
How you doing, Peter?
Pretty good.
I feel like I hated this week more than anything possible.
Why do you think I suggested this idea to us?
Oh god, I didn't realize that it was going to be such a bad combo.
I think actually you're wrong.
Good. Prove it to me.
I mean, I'm not saying they're good movies,
but I think it was actually a fine week.
I concur.
There you go.
This is good content.
This is why I'm the producer, because you're both wrong.
And I'm going to edit it so that I am right.
Just sound clips.
I agree with Peter.
Dog eat dog bad.
Bad dog.
So this week we are discussing the finer merits of Ghost Rider and Dog Eat Dog.
Ghost Rider from 2007, Dog Eat Dog 2016.
Peter, why don't you tell us where these were seeded?
Oh, yeah.
So that's an important aspect of this entire thing.
This is a bracket of 64.
Everything was based on an aggregate score from IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes,
which gave us our general seeding.
The first four episodes are all one seeds against 16.
This is a number eight against a number nine.
So I think we're going to have to see Ghost Rider being slightly better.
Definitely better.
Well, OK, so there's the end of the episode.
See you next week, folks.
So, OK, let's let's discuss Dog Eat Dog first, shall we?
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to I'm going to get you into this.
So to really kind of get in to tell you how shit the plot
is, I'm going to give you the synopsis from Wikipedia
and the synopsis from IMDB real quick.
Wikipedia tells us three former prisoners,
Troy, Mad Dog and Diesel, are hired to kidnap a baby
and share a big ransom payment.
That's it.
If we go to IMDB, we get a little more like production quality
flavor and storyline.
The story of the three men who are served from a lifetime
of experience that runs the gamut from incarceration to liberation.
Dog Eat Dog is the story of three men who are all out of prison
and now have the task of adapting themselves to civilian life.
The California three strikes law looms over them.
But what the hell? They're going to do it.
And they're going to do it their way.
The three men are caught in a fight for their lives.
They're caught in a fight for their lives, but cannot get away
from his hatred for the system.
Diesel is on the mob's payroll and his interest in the in his
suburban home and his nagging wife is waning.
The loose cannon of the trio, Mad Dog,
is possessed by true demons within,
which lead him from one situation to the next.
One more hit, one more jackpot, and they'll all be satisfied.
In the aftermath, they find the law surrounding them wherever they go.
I wish I'd watched that movie.
Yeah, it sounds like, well, like it's got a little more going on in it.
So this movie, how much we like this movie or not,
we just don't want to talk about it.
More accurately fits the one sentence description you get from Wikipedia.
Three dudes out of jail, kind of suck at life and tried to
like get a big score with ransoming a baby.
That sounds like a OK movie.
Right. I mean, it's it's raising Arizona, but like gritty.
Exactly. It's the second time Nick Cage has to abduct a baby.
Yeah, I was really confused when I read the synopsis, though, on IMDb,
which, again, sounds like a much better film.
Yeah, it sounds like it's really got something going.
But the sentence that just the run on sentence that ends with or that starts
with the California three strike law looms over them.
I thought for the first four times I read that I'm like,
do they refer to themselves as the California three? Oh, yeah.
And it's when you read it out loud and like, oh, no, the three strikes.
Well, yeah, the three strikes. They do.
But they're not. They're not in California.
No, they are in Cleveland, which is another dumb place to have a movie.
No. So this movie like you've got these guys.
It starts out in just the most insanely pink room with Willem Dafoe.
He's on a chair doing some coke, gets a phone call for no reason.
Telemarketer destroys the phone. Yeah.
Why did that have to be involved in the why did any of this movie just to show
he's unhinged and so we can see his gutting nice.
I there are two things about this.
So I watched this after both of you and I had gotten nothing but all this is bad.
And then I saw this first scene and I was like, there are things happening
that I that gave me hope.
The aggressive color palette of the first two scenes.
I mean, those colors are so vibrant and aggressive
that they are meant to make you feel as uncomfortable as you do in the scene.
I'm like, that's interesting cinematography.
Maybe this won't be as awful as it is.
And then it just goes away after that.
Although in color theory of laying like aggressive pink is not an upsetting color.
I was very upset by it.
I mean, that's fine. But if you go to like a mental institute or something,
there's going to be a lot of pink on the walls because it's more calming.
I also do like I don't think we need to read too much into it.
I think Schrader was trying to get like really, really just like choicey.
Yeah. Like he's making artistic choices.
That's clear through the movie.
Yeah. The scene where all of a sudden it's black and white for no reason.
That's the strip club. Yeah. Yeah.
We go from colored scene like super colorful scene to black and white scene.
I also just want to point out for no reason Willem Dafoe's look in this scene.
He's got shorts on, sandals with socks and a knife strapped to his ankle.
Yeah. But it's just like a working knife.
Like because it's just a look with the sandals and socks.
Yeah. It's a good look.
He goes to the bathroom and now he's doing heroin.
And then this lady comes home with her kid.
Yeah. She comes home with her kid and she's putting away groceries
and he like kind of saunters out and you're like, oh, OK, he lives here.
And she's like, I told you, you can't stay here.
And it's like, OK, he doesn't live here.
And his car's in the shop.
Yeah. His car's in the shop and he won't get it back until tomorrow.
So he just needs a place to stay. Also, the kids a piece of shit.
Sheila and Mad Dog kind of. Yeah. Mad Dog.
So Willem Dafoe playing Mad Dog. Fuck both of you.
All right. Willem Dafoe, Mad Dog.
He is trying to like sweet talk Sheila now.
With the promise of spare ribs and. Yeah.
It's not even spare ribs. He's like, I'll make short ribs. Short ribs.
And she's OK. I got to say, she's also like six to eight inches taller than him.
And she's a large lady.
And to see him just like almost on his tiptoes trying to like give her kisses
and try to be sweet while he's got this like wild ass like Willem Dafoe
kind of like aggressive mustache look.
And he's in these shorts. He looks like like kind of just a child trying to kiss his mom.
So she's like, OK, you can stay one night, but that's it.
And he's like, OK, so he goes back to the bathroom to clean up or whatever for dinner.
Do more drugs. Yeah.
But I mean, that's what we in the drug industry call cleaning up.
And I left all these drugs out. I got to clean them up.
Putting them in my body. I don't treat them to.
I don't do drugs. That was very convincing.
So she sits down at her computer and then all of a sudden she's screaming and like he has to come out
and she's like, what the fuck do I use my computer for?
I use it for my spreadsheets for church business and replying to emails.
And it's just Asian teen squirting.
Yeah, Asian teen squirters and I was just like, given this kind of like what?
I didn't know I couldn't do that.
So she kicks him out and he's like, I can't go.
And she's like, you're fucking out of here. I got a suitcase full of guns.
Yeah, that's his excuse why he can't leave.
So she's like, OK.
So he's like kind of tussling with her, but she's obviously way bigger and stronger than him.
And so he grabs his knife and just cuts her throat.
And while she's going down, he like stabs her a few more times.
But then the shithead kid, like she comes down the stairs and Willems like, well, you're going out, too.
So he goes to the previously aforementioned suitcase full of guns,
because apparently stabbing a child is not good.
Got to shoot it, grabs a revolver, chases the kid upstairs and puts a pillow over the kid.
And then from about eight inches away shoots the kid. So twice.
Yeah. The pillow is not really doing anything to muffle the noise at this point.
It's mostly there so we don't have to see a child murder or a mannequin murder, because I bet that wasn't a real child, Sean.
I bet that child didn't die. I bet they lied to us.
I mean, this does continue the tradition so far of every child in a Nick Cage film is terrible.
Except for handpan.
Except for handpan. Handpan's got it going on.
Handpan shouldn't get shot in the head twice.
Yeah. So then we move on.
To black and white.
Yeah. Black and white scene.
And turn Nick Cage.
Yeah. And he kind of what is this where he talks about how like nobody likes Mad Dog,
but he owes Mad Dog because he kind of helped him out in prison.
This is the exposition scene. Yeah. Cool.
So that's why he alone likes Mad Dog.
Yeah. Then we get into talking about like how these three guys.
The Thor being Diesel.
Yeah. Diesel, who has absolutely no history given to us in this movie, I don't think.
Like apparently he's got connections with the mob and he's got a suburban home and a nagging wife.
Which none of that's in the film.
None of it. You never see any of that.
Diesel's a debt collector is what they give him.
Also, Diesel is played by Christopher Matthew Cook, who I don't know anything about.
Exactly. I thought it was Will Sasso for a second when the movie first started in black and white.
I'm like, this is a stretch for Sasso.
Yeah. So these three guys, what they do is they just collect loans for people, you know, mob people, most likely.
But because of the California three strikes law, these guys have to be careful.
That's all you need to know about these three guys.
They're shitty like criminals because obviously they've been to prison twice now.
Mad Dogs, Wild. We should say Nicholas Cage, Troy.
He fancies himself like a pretty smooth dude.
I actually kind of think that he like the character saw one too many Ocean's movies and just thinks that he's Danny Ocean.
Yeah. He really tries for that.
He's the fixer.
Even though like he's obviously trying to pull up Humphrey Bogart.
Because he looks like Bogart. Someone told him that in prison.
Yeah. It's like, well, you're kind of but stretched out.
Yeah. So these guys, they do a job.
They think it was in like Atlantic City or some shit.
I don't know. They I don't know.
They just get a guy to give them the money they owe a defense attorney who's, you know,
been taking bribes, wants to collect off an old client.
They go posing as cops in a crappy black sedan with bad white tape to spell police on it.
Nab him. Take him to the house where they keep drugs and money.
Safe house.
And so they go to the projects with this dude.
I mean, it's clearly supposed to be the projects.
I don't think Cleveland has that, but I didn't look into it.
They complain a lot about rap music and Taylor Swift in these scenes.
It's insane how many times Taylor Swift is brought up in this movie.
Yes. They talk about it when they're just talking about getting out of jail.
They like it. There's a Taylor Swift song, I think, at one point.
I don't know. But like her name, there's posters for Taylor Swift.
There's the strip club they hang out at on the sign outside.
It says Taylor Swift lookalike.
Yeah, the Taylor Swift lookalike contest.
And then at the end, Nick Cage is reading a maxim with Taylor Swift on the cover.
Yeah, it's so dumb.
They take this guy to the projects, shake him down.
They get the drugs. There wasn't money.
I'm assuming they just sold the drugs because in the next scene,
they're in a hotel room and Nick Cage shows up with a whole bunch of money
and splits it up between the guys.
So like each one got like nine grand out of this.
And then they have a party.
Yeah. And then they have a party where they proceed to just like do other drugs.
Jump on the bed.
Jump on the bed. Yeah.
Pillow fights, have a food fight.
Three pebbles with orange juice. Yeah.
All sorts of like weird stuff.
It's a it's the dumbest party I've ever seen.
It's meant to show you how close they are as a group
because we're not going to get any other character development in this entire film.
No, they've wrapped it up now.
It's good. You know who likes who and who doesn't.
So Nick Cage and this sex worker are
let me say that less shitty.
Nick Cage and this lady of the evening are doing their thing.
She kind of plays him like trying to take her to Nice.
Yeah, he's like planning this expensive trip to Nice,
which obviously he's not going to be able to do with the nine grand or whatever.
He just spent probably a lot of on her.
He bought her a tourmaline bracelet. Yeah.
And the other guys do their own shitty things.
This scene, it's probably the second most important scene
because then they decide they're going to like get a bigger job the next day
because they don't have any money.
So he goes to this guy, the Greek, the Greek.
It's the guy who gives them jobs played by the director.
Nobody else wanted to take the role. Yeah.
Yeah. He asked a bunch of people some of the names that he approached for this role,
who all didn't take it, were Michael Wincott, Michael Douglas, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese,
Nick Nolte, Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum and Rupert Everett.
Literally any of those guys would have been better at acting than Paul Schrader.
This was a Trader's first acting role.
It was his debut performance. It shows.
Yeah. So it's just a series of unfortunate events from here.
They get a job. They're told, go abduct this guy's kid.
We'll ransom it. We'll give you guys $750,000.
Right. So he's like, great. They're like, OK.
Nicholas Cage thinks in his head, he's like, oh, it's kind of dangerous.
The success rate for ransoming kids are usually found. Blah, blah, blah.
But he decides to do it anyways, because otherwise there wouldn't be a movie. Shame.
They go. They make this plan.
They agree that it's either success or death. Yeah. Success or death.
Because they don't want no one can turn.
So if they're not going to succeed, they're going to do it samurai style.
Yeah. Ride or die. Ride or die.
They go to the known samurai phrase, ride or die. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't see what's confusing about that. So they go to the horses. Yeah.
Or they died. A running samurai doesn't have a very good chance in a battle.
Sam, they go to this house, break in.
The dad not supposed to be there, but he is there because his baby mama's bringing her boyfriend around.
So he's there with a gun, passes out.
They break in. Best criminals ever wear no masks. Yeah.
No masks, no gloves. The dad walks into the baby's room as they're there, says,
You guys done fucked up. And then Mad Dog explodes his head with a shotgun.
So they take this baby. They take the kids like nurse or whatever, like nanny, lock her in a house.
Great. Last time we see that lady or that baby. Moving on.
Like Troy gets a phone call from the Greek and he's like, Hey, you guys have had some problems.
And Nicholas Cage is like, Oh, yeah, but nothing like too big.
And the Greeks like, well, you shot the guy we're supposed to get money from.
And they're like, no, we didn't. We shot Jose Vasquez.
It's like, well, no, who you shot was Brennan, blah, blah, blah.
Which is such a dumb, like, just wait and pull the rug out from under them because they checked his wallet.
He had an ID that said otherwise. What's why? What's the point?
Well, he's obviously a criminal. I just meant in terms of this story that again, spoiler alert.
This is where this story point stops. Yeah.
Elsewhere. Keep wanting to call Diesel Dom, but I know it's not a Fast and the Furious movie.
Because then it would be watchable.
That's debatable as you get towards the end of nine was garbage.
They're disposing of the body. Mad Dog and Diesel are getting rid of the body.
Diesel's got Mad Dog's got a place. Mad Dog also wants to confess something to Diesel.
Yeah. So he talks about how sad like while they're out disposing of a body, he's like, oh, man, you and you and Troy, you guys are so cool.
And I just want to be cool with you. And I know you don't like me.
And this is real hard. And it's such a wacky Willem Dafoe insecurity speech.
Yeah. It's just strange to kind of sit through.
So they ditch the body, hijinks ensue as the floor gives out on the second floor and they fall through.
I really started to fade in this part of the movie. Diesel and Mad Dog not getting along.
They start to argue. Whatever. Diesel shoots Mad Dog.
Boom. One character done. We can move on. Diesel starts going back.
He calls Troy. Troy's like, well, we got a problem because we shot the guy.
And Diesel's like, well, we got a problem, too, because Mad Dog's out. He's not coming back.
Don't see like Troy doesn't seem that broken up. Whatever. Nobody is because this movie. Awesome.
They get back together. Troy and Diesel. They had to go get snacks.
Yeah. Diesel wanted snacks. So they go to they go to an Apple grocery store.
We're back at the grocery store. Nick Cage stays in the car.
He's Maxim with Taylor Swift on the cover. Correct.
Diesel goes inside while he's inside reaching for something.
The manager sees that Diesel's packing heat and he calls the cops.
One cop's like when they show up, one cop's like, oh, yeah, I'll go in and check.
And then Lady Cop, you go over there and run the plates on that car.
So Lady Cop drives the cop car over, parks behind and instead of just running the plates, just like goes up, knocks on the windows like, hey, she gets Cage's ID.
He gets out of the car because she tells him to. There's like some kerfuffle and he decks her.
Yeah, he decks her, which is totally not cool because she wasn't trying to burn him.
And we've established you can punch women if they're trying to burn you.
But only once. No other reasons why you can.
Episode four. Please see episode four, Wicker Man, for this rule that we will stick to forever.
And you should, too. Diesel is coming out and he sees Cage just be a real douche and punch a lady.
And then she like the other cops got caged at this point. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. And so Diesel's like, fuck it. I'm a shoot a hoe.
And so he pulls out his gun and he shoots a cop and then Diesel books it gets steals.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Diesel runs off. Other cop chases him. No other cops.
So holding Cage. More cops show up. Oh, yeah. I just watched this like 10 minutes before you guys showed up.
He kills another cop. No, he shoots the other cop in the lake. Doesn't kill this one, but steals his car.
And as he's driving away, drives back through the parking lot just to, you know, give a bird to the first cop.
Yes. And then has a heart attack and dies. Yeah.
It's like, that's a shitty cinema moment.
I mean, the last 120 minutes have been shitty cinema moments.
We move on. Cage gets arrested.
Other cops take him to a quarry and proceed to kill the shit out of him for being a cop killer, even though, yeah, he punched that lady a few times.
Uncool. Uncool. And then beat him up a bit, then strap him or handcuff him to the side of the car and like drag him through the quarry.
Yeah, they handcuffed him to the seatbelt, which they closed outside of the car.
Which seems like the perfect place to end this movie, but fade to black, fade back into a diner.
And we have a nice couple leave the diner only to be held at gunpoint by a fairly beat up Nick Cage.
Now doing a bad Humphrey Bogart. Yeah.
Now he's like he was always kind of trying to do the accent, but now he's like fully leaned into it.
He takes this preacher and his wife when he when he goes to get in their car, he says just the dumbest thing.
He looks at the priest or the preacher and he's just like, you ever been inside?
You ever do time? And the priest is like, yeah, I have.
Well, then you know how it is. Yeah. They always they say they forgive you, but they haven't.
Yeah. They're driving them away.
Some cops go to like pull them over some shit gets out of the car and the cops are like, blah, blah, blah.
And he's like, no. And then like the cops just unload and shoot like the yeah.
They kill the people who are in the car, kill Nick Cage, who's like definitely far enough away from the car
that nobody should have been shooting into the car.
Then that's it. Who cares? That's and this whole final scene again.
I rewatched it to make sure that like when they were dragging him through the quarry that the handcuff broke or something,
because how does he get away? Did they just let him go?
Well, it's not like he has a handcuff on his wrist in the next scene anyway.
No, that scene also starts with the news talking about how Troy and whatever Diesel's real name were pronounced dead at the scene.
So just it makes no sense. Was this his crazy like death throw of his brain?
I think that's definitely what it's supposed to be. It's not clear.
Agreed. Because like the big lean into the Bogart stuff. Yeah.
He talks about how in previous movies he's chosen to channel a former or an older actor or something for the role.
And he said that in this one he just like really went into it and like he channeled Humphrey Bogart.
It's funny because in the next movie we're going to talk about Ghost Rider. He channels Sling Blade.
I don't know if I'm supposed to take the bait on this one.
I know whatever I say will get edited out though. Sling Blade Runner.
I freak out. Those replicants are funny. Not funny.
Ha ha. We got to wrap this one. It's an insufferably bad movie.
OK, but just to go. I mean, this is a zero out of 10.
I have at least 30 minutes more material for after the movie.
Just to get to the crux of this podcast, which is about Nicolas Cage films.
This is like the most non-performance I've seen him give yet. And I watched Left Behind.
I'm kind of fascinated by this dichotomy because like Willem Dafoe is a pretty unhinged character actor. Right?
Prime Dafoe. This is just Dafoe. It is an element.
What I find really interesting about Dafoe is that people, you know, the James Franco's of the world and Tobey Maguire's and Spider-Man are like,
Oh, I don't know. How do you get into the mindset of it? And Willem Dafoe is like, I read the script and I just do the things that they say.
And like, I think that Cage is much more of that like cerebral. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. And this one, it's such a fucking like wet fart performance from him.
It's just nothing. Nothing in there. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
Let's put a fucking bow on this one. Last thoughts, both of you. Then quotes.
I do that I liked one I think I like more.
First, you've got Troy. This is in the scene where he's trying to find him a better job.
And he's like, I'll get us a real good gig. I'll get us such a good gig.
I'll nab the tits right off. Yeah. I mean, it was an OK line.
Well, it's not an OK line. It's a shitty line and a shitty script.
But when they're abducting the baby, Troy, the nanny, the baby and Mad Dog.
And Troy is saying to the nanny, can you shut this baby up? No.
You know how? Where's the thing you put in the fucking baby's mouth?
What's it called? And Mad Dog just says, real quiet.
Dick. It's like Mad Dog fucking seriously.
Yeah. The only the only quote I have on this is actually not a Nick Cage one.
And it was from Paul Schrader.
And he was quoted as saying, I've made some important films.
Dog Eat Dog is not one of them. That's amazing.
Let's talk about what I think is comedy gold.
Ghostwriter, spiritual film, colon, ghostwriter, spiritual film, colon, ghostwriter.
Based on the Marvel comic, most everyone I feel who's listening to this at least knows who ghostwriter is.
Stuntman, Johnny Blaze. I wrote Johnny Cage in my notes.
Stuntman, Johnny Blaze makes a Faustian bargain and becomes the Devil's bounty hunter, the ghostwriter,
tasked with stopping the literal son of Satan, Blackheart,
and his emo boy band from obtaining the contract of Sanvanganza, a contract of a thousand evil souls.
This movie starts off with Sam Elliott doing his best Sam Elliott impression to narrate the contract of Sanvanganza,
which will get expositioned two more times in this film.
So there's no point to this scene somewhat explaining the legend of the ghostwriter
and how one ghostwriter kept the contract and outran the devil.
Then we cut to a young Johnny Blaze and his father Barton Blaze doing a motorcycle jump
that is at most three feet across through a large ring of fire,
which I mean, I guess I was a hick from Texas in I assume the 70s.
Maybe impressive. Don't sue us, Texas.
Those lawyers only have law degrees from Texas, which I don't think count in the rest of the country.
Johnny has a crush. Johnny has a girlfriend, Roxy, who's being shipped off to live with her mom
because apparently the carnival is no place to raise a child.
So this is a love story about two carnies is where we start.
I gotta say, so the casting for young Eva Mendes pretty fucking good.
It looks like a young Eva Mendes.
And the casting for a young Nicolas Cage looks nothing like Nicolas Cage.
It looks like the dude who played Goku in that bad, like Americanized version of Dragon Ball.
But the best part is to connect those two characters of Nicolas Cage and not Nicolas Cage.
They just made Johnny Blaze keep the same haircut since he was 17 and blue contacts.
He had vivid blue eyes in this.
Roxy's being shipped away.
Johnny notches their initials into a tree that'll come back later.
She's going to be shipped off. So what are they going to do?
So Johnny decides he's going to run away with the with his girlfriend.
They're both 17 at the time.
Johnny goes home to plan his inevitable escape to find out his father is dying of cancer.
So he goes to work on the bikes to get away from his dad and blow off some steam where Peter Fonda shows up as Mephistopheles,
who has my favorite line in this film because he's walking through the carnival
and as he's walking through, all the lights are like exploding around him.
And he just stops, looks around and goes, far out.
That's the devil, folks.
He shows up and offers Johnny a deal.
You know, I will save your father's life.
You just have to sell me your soul.
And Johnny doesn't so much agree as he just goes and looks at the contract, cuts his thumb on the spiky devil magic stuff,
and get some blood on there. And Peter Fonda is like, well, that'll do.
The next day, Barton's cured of cancer.
Everything's going great.
He's like, hey, I got my my scans back from this morning.
Yeah, I'm perfectly fine.
As a fiddle.
So wake up so early that I can go in and get cancer tests done.
Yeah. So the next day, they're preparing for the show or Barton preparing for the show.
Johnny's not getting ready.
Barton's like, what is going on?
It's like Ross's dad's going to send her away. We got to go.
It's like, that's that's a great plan.
The cops are going to get you before you get to the county line.
But Barton's got a soft spot for his kid and young love.
So agrees to help his child perform a kidnapping and give him the fastest bike they got.
Yeah, which happens to be a chopper, which is not a fast bike.
As Johnny is like walking his way out of the out of the carnival, you hear Barton go up and goes out like a bitch.
Yeah, his motorcycle is going up the ramp and then he just falls over.
And the next time we see his body, it's lightly singed, but he's dead.
Yeah, this is this is roughly when I like lost it and could not tolerate this movie.
But again, so this is like this is the preamble to what is the best part of this film, which is Nicholas Cage.
So Johnny drives in the rain to find Roxy at the tree and just looks at her and drives off.
Cut to a year's cut to a now 50 year old Nicholas Cage jumping a large number of cab trucks.
The tractor. Yeah.
A tractor trailer set up.
It's like, you know, you can't live in fear.
And he, you know, jumps in and just completely eats it on the landing.
The front the front wheel of the bike goes over, it's like smashes his helmet.
He like slides into the wall.
And then, you know, his best friend and guy runs the crew, Mac, played by Donal Lowe, my favorite character actor ever.
Make sure he's OK. Everything's fine.
The unkillable man, Mr. Immortal.
Although the best part about this is Nick Cage.
Johnny, I'm wondering if this was just something to try and fuck with the rating of this film, but he doesn't drink.
He just has a martini glass of yellow and red jelly beans.
And he swirls it before you like them down.
Yeah, they talk about not in the film, but outside of them, they talk about him making this choice of changing Johnny and like taking away the drinking and the smoking and stuff.
So in the previous one, he's always like throwing away his dad's cigarettes and stuff like that.
And so in this one, they've decided to like he just decided like, you know, I'm going to play him clean.
Yeah. Johnny Blaze is portrayed as such larger than my thing.
I was born and raised on a coast.
I don't know what happens between coasts, but I can't imagine going down to the Sobey Arena to watch a 10-second stunt of a guy like jumping a football field.
And that being a satisfying day, Johnny gets home.
Mac has given him more shit about he's getting into the cult.
He's got a bunch of religious texts.
There's a lot of cool illustrations of demons.
We see more and more of just the weird character that is Johnny Blaze.
More jelly beans, more monkey fights, more monkey.
Johnny Blaze is a weird obsession with monkeys, with chimps specifically in this scene.
He's just like channeling a five year old. Yes.
He's like, oh, he's got a there's a documentary on chimpanzees. I want to see it.
He's got a car off of jelly beans and he like asthma.
Wanted to jelly's. Also, I think Johnny might have been hit on the head or crashed one too many times or suffered so much head trauma because the accent is thicker than when he was younger and much worse.
And he still has, again, the haircut of a 17 year old boy.
And uncontrollable laughter.
And apparently he's just watching the TV.
Yeah, apparently the the hairpiece took three hours to attach every day.
While all this is going on, we cut to the desert where Blackheart played by Wes Bentley, which is a guy that I always forget is a real person until I see him.
I'm like, oh, yeah, what's Bentley?
Wes Bentley in 2000 and a 2010 interview admitted that this was at the height of his cocaine use and pretty much every role he took in this era of his work was solely to buy more drugs.
That's cool.
Drugs are cool.
I don't do drugs.
Yeah, he shows up and he only talks like this.
He's trying to find the contract of Sanvanganza.
He didn't fall like his father.
So Mephistovelis has no control over him on this plane.
So Mephistovelis like, well, I'm going to get the ghostwriter kick your ass.
It's like, good luck with that.
So he goes and harasses some bikers, kills them all, like clears out a biker bar.
That's when the planet here show up Blackheart's boy band of Earth, water and wind.
Yeah, there was an air demon.
Yeah.
We're all apparently fallen angels who hide amongst the elements.
So the three real demons we get in this movie, like this CG heavy action thriller, we get a guy who's just looks like Pigpen from peanuts, just coated in dirt.
That's dirt.
A guy with just wild hair and sharp teeth and a shitty mustache and a shitty mustache.
And then a guy who is just wet.
Wet boy.
He's the best one.
And what's what's great is they they blew their entire wet boy budget on him being a puddle him.
Well, him like showing up out of water the first time in that really bad mid 2000s CG for liquid that they hadn't gotten down yet.
Like it hadn't gotten any better since the secret world about what's Mac.
Johnny is about to jump Max.
Like you can't jump 50 cars.
That's crazy.
You're already jumping a football field.
And John is like, I got to prove it's me.
When he's getting ready, he like chugs coffee out of a coffee pot, just being more weird, weird celebrity again.
And he tells Max, like, don't worry.
I took the cars out to come back.
Like, oh, thank you.
Thank you.
That way, you know, if you crash, you'll just have soft grass to fall on.
And as he's going to do his stunt, he takes his cane.
Roxy shows up to interview him because now she's a news anchor.
And, oh, the most awkward interview receives like right before actions goes like, how you been?
I heard you got married.
She didn't get married.
Fell through.
And he's just and it just leaves up to her asking like, well, this whole life of celebrity and being on the road and death defined.
Has it ever cost you anything in your life?
Anything important in your life?
Did you miss out on anything?
And he just like solid to beat stare into nothing and goes.
Yeah.
And that's the interview.
And then he asked her to stay for the show.
And she's just like, I never like to watch you perform, Johnny.
And she leaves.
And so Johnny goes to do the show and as Max, like walking him through the setup and it's like, I'm so glad you got rid of the cars.
The dome of the aforementioned so we don't open and six Apache helicopters land.
He's like, why didn't you tell me?
It's like, well, you would have freaked out.
It's like, yeah, I'm not really into watching ritual sacrifice.
And Johnny's like, do you think she's on the freeway?
And he's like, what are you talking about?
And he just like guns it and just does the jump before they're ready just to get to the other end so he can just bail on the show and like chase her down the freeway.
And after being told she didn't like watching him risk his life, he's doing so much dumb tricks next to the car to like show off for her.
Like riding on the handlebars.
OK, when he's riding on the handlebars, though, and like talking to her and he's, you know, you can see like one hand he's actually like air quoting right here, working the throttle and keeping the bike in place.
And in order to have a larger conversation with he scoots back on the bike, but it's just like if I was sitting on a bench and just kind of lifted a leg and scooted back and lifted a leg and scooted back and it's like, that's that's not how you would like.
You don't even have anything to put your feet on to like scoot like that.
I'm assuming you can put your feet on the fender and like, but you'd have to like lean the bike to offset as your weight is adjusted.
This is the second and we all know about bike leaning.
Yeah, this is this is what we call a callback.
So but he gets a date. He asked, like, do you still like Italian Italian gets a date.
He can't. She's like, Don't be late.
So we cut to her in the restaurant downing a bottle of wine, like looking at her, like looking at her phone.
There are no messages. So Johnny's already late.
We cut to him in his apartment talking about how he can't be afraid, just staring in the mirror, just psyching himself up for a date.
He's already late for you see his weird abs. Oh, yeah.
It's always so strange when Nick Cage like works out because you just I assume that he would have just lived his life like any of us, like a normal dude.
Nick Cage is just like one of us. Yeah. I mean, I think so.
When he hears a motorcycle outside, Mephistopheles is there.
We're 45 minutes into this movie right now.
And he's told that, you know, it's time to pay up on that contract and he's got to go stop Blackheart.
And Johnny's like, that's your problem.
Gets on again the bike that the devil had waiting for him outside.
And then the bike just shoots down the road, shooting fire out the back of it, blowing cars into local businesses,
destroying this part of Texas.
And the bike takes him to the cemetery where the contract used to be.
And now at just over 50 minutes of film, the bike like thrusts him onto the floor.
And we see the actual ghostwriter transformation for the first time, which still looks pretty cool.
Yeah. And we see the most I think the most cage scene we've seen yet in this podcast.
Oh, he just formations goes between screaming and laughing maniacally and transforms into a pretty cool rendition of the ghostwriter.
2007 still like the CG for the most part still holds up like the fire looks cool.
Yeah. The the skull was actually based on X rays of Nick Cage's head.
Like they designed it after Nick Cage's actual skull.
Well, at least it would fit like face bits and stuff just kind of burn away.
So it transitions nicely into a skull with cheekbones in the correct spot.
Yeah, it's not too bad. And then it's and it's only ever good as long as it's not in a scene with anybody.
The first transformation, like the appearance then kind of sucks because of the jacket he's wearing.
Yeah. The second jacket better.
But it's mostly because of how it's not even like the spikes and like the cool gauntlets and everything.
Those all do make him a lot cooler. But that first jacket, it looks so like padded and like V shaped.
His torso looks enormous.
What I always found really weird, too, is I don't know how familiar you are with like human hand bones, but they're like it's just, you know,
little strings of bones or just little rows of bones that go from your wrist to the end of your fingers.
So just seeing that on fire is not impressive at all.
It just looks like he has tiny baby hands. Yeah.
And here. So here's my connection to Wicker Man as he's rocking up to stop Blackheart fucking semi truck comes out of nowhere
and just smashes into a train just. Yeah, that's true.
And that's by the dirt guy who we never actually see his power because he's just dirty.
Yeah, that's not it. I mean, we want to see actions.
I just need like three or four seconds of like people exploding in dirt and like people sinking in dirt and like people just like ruining their white pants on dirt.
I'm assuming this is the pain he causes.
Mostly dirt related pain. People exploding. Yes. With dirt. With dirt. Yeah.
Can you imagine if well, it's like a you remember vacuums that when they had like the internal bag, but if you overfilled it.
Yeah. That's what people are. Yeah. We're just a vessel for dirt.
And eventually the dirt comes out in our white pants on our white pants.
One of the really interesting part of this is how they did the really demonic ghostwriter voice.
They had Nick Cage record the lines.
Then they filter those through three separate animal noises growls played backwards
and then put it through like a mechanical volumizer before adding like adding like charcoal crackle.
Probably the most interesting production part of it.
Yes. Because I would listen to it.
It's like when Sam Elliott ghosted out, you could tell it was Sam Elliott.
When Nicolas Cage ghosts out, it's like I can hardly even understand what they're saying.
Yeah. And oh God, there's a great there's a great action film one liner ghostwriter rocks out from behind the truck, taps him on the shoulders like,
Hey, dirt bag. I love that proceeds to like burn him up.
Oh, yeah. With the chain just wraps his flamey chain around him.
And that sends him back to hell all the while.
Roxy is still in the restaurant just drinking more wine.
At one point, she pulls out a magic eight ball.
What was the deal with the eight? I don't know.
They never established it in their like past. No, I was going to ask you if that was like a comic known trope for the only thing I could think of is the orb.
It was a character who just has a giant eyeball as a head that doesn't seem like that's what they were going for.
No, but it's the only thing I could think of.
And my favorite Roxy line from the film is she's like downed at least a full bottle of wine in the waiters, just kind of circling the whole time.
And she's like, you think I'm pretty right.
And he just goes, just walks off.
Yeah, because that waiter has a chance with, you know, somebody better looking than Ava Mendes.
But then the ghost rider drives through town after destroying the dirt demon, but letting Blackheart and the rest get away.
They don't show they don't show them escaping.
He just kills one of them and just fucks off.
Oh, but then we see the bike actually turn into the hell cycle for the first time.
True. Which the hell cycle reeks of the spawn movie.
This whole movie reeks of the spawn movie.
The CG is better. Yeah.
Then he stops a mugging where a goth checks being like in a purse stolen. Rebel Wilson.
Also, first appearance in cinema. Oh, yeah.
That was Josie's favorite part of the movie, the Rebel Wilson interview.
Thanks, Ghost Rider. Just ending with the description of him and just being like, his head was on fire.
Like, oh, yeah.
She buries the lead with that one, too, because she was like, well, you know, he was like thin, but like not too thin.
He was like cut. He like had a cool motorcycle.
Oh, and his head was on fire. Yeah.
His head was a skull.
This is the first time we see the pennant stare.
So when the Ghost Rider looks into evil's eyes and deep in their eyes, yeah, can like make them relive all the pain they've caused and it kills them.
This is when we're introduced to Sam Elliott, who solely plays Sam Elliott in this film, who is a caretaker, plays the caretaker of the cemetery where Barton Blaze is buried.
Convenient and says his one memorable line from this film, hey, bonehead, finds out about the contract.
We get all the exposition that we should have gotten half an hour ago.
This movie is two hours long for no reason.
Like I said, it's an hour until we see Ghost Rider, which it doesn't need to be.
We get a few more fight scenes.
He admits to Roxy what's going on, that he's a devil's bounty hunter and she thinks he's insane or just lying to her because wouldn't you?
But then, of course, lie to a woman.
The best scene in the film where he's in jail and he's surrounded by evil people and just starts losing his shit gets into one of the one of the guys in the holding cell, like rips his jacket and starts haranguing him.
And then just the coolest visual scene is he goes writers out like blows everyone away, like across the room into bars and he's walking through and as he's walking sprinklers are going off when he's walking under them.
There's a lot of visual flavor in this scene and then like goes up to the guy who ripped his jacket, like nice jacket gets the jacket, gets the gloves, which hold up, which hide the baby fingers.
And when he walks to the end of the end of the cell, the bar just melt around him. Like just there's a lot of love that went into this scene.
The one motorcycle chase we get in this, he fights the wind boy.
There's a police helicopter chasing him.
Cage, like, or goes right or like lasso's it and he's like, come here.
The helicopter pilot's like, no.
He's like, you're pissing me off.
Just come here.
No, I don't think.
Oh, and before he kills the before he kills the wind guy, he says time to clear the air.
There's so many good just bad puns in this.
He defeats the wind boy who says like, you can't catch the wind.
So he like spins a chain on fire and catches the wind goes back to the caretaker.
This is when we find out that the caretaker is actually the ghostwriter who escaped with the contract.
He, you know, ghost writers up is like, I got one more ride in me and they ride 500 miles to San Venganza.
Get there. Then he Sam Elias back up and like, I can only do it one more time.
And I saved it for this. Saved it for what?
Why did he even go at that point?
Yes. And he like he leaves the scene like he rides off into the sun.
Well, into the sunrise being like, I've done a lot of bad.
I'm hoping this is enough for him to forgive me enough.
What you you whisked out at the end.
You could have rode a bitch on the motorcycle, got to San Venganza,
and then both of you just curb stomp fucking West Bentley.
But they doesn't. He hands him a shotgun and they go on there and he goes on his way.
How much would you love to see Sam Elliot riding bitch behind Ghost Rider on a motorcycle?
That's all I want to say. Just with his arms lightly wrapped around Ghost Rider's waist.
Bony arms, though, right?
Although that would be really funny if they were both ghosted out
like two like badass bone boys, just the heads ablaze arms gently wrapped around.
Wait, how did he kill Waterboy or Wetboy?
So he's like he's walking his motorcycle through a shallow pond
and he gets pulled down into this very deep pond now.
And Waterboy is just like trying to drown him.
So he just ghost riders out and boils them. Yeah.
He just turns on fire, which is his one power.
Dumbass, which is also just kind of dumb because we don't get a one liner for that one.
Yeah, because he's underwater.
We get to the fight, throws him the the contract, but then they start tussling.
He eventually gets a contract, which gives him the power of bad CG red eyes.
And West Bentley is one memorable line from the film.
Yes, so he gets our legion contract.
We are many that lets him absorb all the soul, all the souls,
which is how we got to this point.
I don't think we addressed what was actually going to happen.
A thousand. Well, we didn't know what was going to happen until this point.
But a thousand. So he gets the power of a thousand souls.
I'm pretty sure hell has more than a thousand souls.
So, yeah, they tussle.
Roxy actually kind of comes to the rescue and like start shooting West Bentley
because now they're in daylight and he can't be ghostwriter in daylight.
So he's trying to get into a crypt like in the shadows where you can ghostwriter out.
She distracts West Bentley with the two shots left in the shotgun.
You know, Nick Cage like throw me the guns like it's not throw me the gun.
She's she throws him the gun and he like thrusts his hands into the shadow.
And the gun gets ghostwriter out and he shoots West Bentley, blowing him up.
And then, oh, the one thing that really is he tried to penance their black heart,
but he has no soul to burn.
So Nick Cage, you know, ghostwriter out grabs him like, you know,
now you're full of a thousand souls, feel them all burn and burns them all up.
Killing Blackheart, Mephistopheles shows up like, cool, you fulfilled the contract.
Just give me back the ghostwriter and I'll be on my way.
Johnny Blaisley, now I'm going to keep this. I'm going to use it against you.
And the devil gets mad and fucks off.
Johnny drives them back to the tree from their childhood,
which I can't imagine was that close, where they have their where they say
their goodbye and have their last awkward kiss of the movie.
Turn to the end and then to the end and then to the end and then I do want to talk about one.
I do want to get to the point in one part of this film.
I do want to get the point.
One point in this film, which is the point point to it.
Well, no, there's that awkward.
He like stands at the side, raises his arm kind of above eye level
and points down at people from far away.
And that's how Johnny Blaisley always points.
They do it seven times in this film.
And I have to imagine that there was just some key concept art of Ghost Rider doing that.
So Nick Cage just made that his thing.
I thought it was the only way the CG people could make Ghost Rider do it.
Like like they did a mock up of the CG and it's like, well, this is how a bony hand is going to point.
It's probably going to have like a dumb claw when you point a shit.
But it's it's it's so funny to see him and young him do it throughout the film.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. They established this is how he points.
Yeah. Yeah. That's that's pretty much Ghost Rider.
Do you have any favorite quotes from this film?
I liked the two one liners like the dirt bag and
well, whatever, clear the air time to clean that clear the air.
Yeah. I wish he would have thrown out.
I like got to get wet to stay wet.
I really enjoyed not necessarily a spoken line,
but when Ghost Rider jumps the bike off of a bridge and then like gets it to raise up on the water
and then just rides away on top of the river, flipping off the cops.
Yeah. That's my unspoken quote that I loved.
I do like when he goes for it and does, ah, ah, ah, and lags his finger.
My favorite Nick Cage line, Max, like changing the channel and there's a monkey.
There's a chimp documentary on and Nick Cage goes, put the monkey show on Mac Mac, the monkey show.
As far as like superhero movies and stuff we're going at this time,
I mean, we're trending forward.
I mean, not necessarily Spider-Man really set the bar.
Yeah. But Blade was pretty good, too.
Blade was the first. Yeah.
But I mean, you know, in terms of a comic, accurate Ghost Rider, this was pretty close.
Yeah, it's not bad.
It's not what I wanted in 2007. Being a huge Marvel fan, he really pushed for this role.
He wanted to do this like he loves Marvel Comics. Yeah.
He stole the name Cage from Luke Cage, Power Man.
But yeah, I watched both these movies twice and I enjoyed one of them twice.
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that I think we're on the same page with this.
I don't think dog eat dog is really going down this week.
It's going to be big winner. Yeah. Yeah.
Dog eat dog taking it all the way. Wait, what? No, no.
Critics, roll them.
OK, I mean, I'm going to assume you're being facetious. Yeah, yeah.
No dog eat dog stuff.
Ghost Rider is an awesome comedy. Yeah, it's good.
And clearly a lot of love went into it from a lot of people.
Yeah, I agree. I think a lot of people really enjoyed making it.
Whether Peter enjoyed the movie or not is irrelevant.
I didn't and you're right.
What is coming up next, Peter?
All right. Next up, we have our comedy bracket.
It's it could happen to you and racing with the moon.
I have not watched it. So our non planned sequential pairings
continues with its Bridget Fonda, which is Peter Fonda's daughter.
These are weirdly connecting. Yeah.
Well, from Hayden's bedroom, we wish you all a good day and a good night.
Yeah, do us a favor and rate us five stars and subscribe.
Even if you don't like us. Yeah.
Oh, I figured you meant something about cloaca's.
Yeah, I could have.
I mean, I got to say, a cloaca makes a lot of sense.
Like, that's an efficient hole. Yeah.
It's for piss and shit and fucking maximize one orifice.
This is really less appealing the more you talk about it.
Listen, you heard it here. I'm pro cloaca.
Deal with it. A hole's a hole, man.
What's better? Like, you tell me where I'm just going to.
Yeah, go up. Stop.
Stop better. Keep going.
All right. That's pretty good.