Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Parent Guide

Eastern Europe heats up when a gang of thugs hunts down a young mother and her son Danny. Working for a devil that resides in the human form of Roarke (Ciarán Hinds), Ray Carrigan (Johnny Whitworth) expects to make some substantial cash for delivering the boy. But he doesn’t have a clue about the adolescent’s significance.

Before becoming a mother, Nadya (Violante Placido) agreed to conceive and bare the demon’s child in exchange for her life. Now the evil master has sent Carrigan to retrieve and deliver his offspring in time for a satanic ritual that will perpetuate the old man’s earthly reign.

Not far away Johnny Blaze (Nicholas Cage) is holed up in an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere. He too made a pact with the devil. Now when his temperature rises, he turns into "a hunk, a hunk of burning love". (Oh wait that’s Elvis.) Johnny morphs into the Ghost Rider, a flaming motorcycle riding skeleton that wreaks his own form of justice.

Unannounced and unbidden, Moreau (Idris Elba), a member of a secretive religious sect, shows up at Johnny’s hideout and urges him to help escort Danny to a secluded monastery where he will be safe. That’s all the invitation Ghost Rider needs to send him blazing down the highway in search of Carrigan.

That’s also the extent of character development we get in this script where Ghost Rider spends way too much time craning his charcoaled cranium from one side to the other before blasting the bad guys with his hot breath. While endless scenes of death-inflicting gunfire and other morbid means of death are depicted along with a smattering of profanities that include the sexual expletive, some parents may also be concerned with the portrayal of Satanic ceremonies and an all-too-casually administered Christian communion.

Short on storyline and swollen with special effects, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance will likely leave some viewers feeling charred after mounting up for this inferno of a ride.

About author

Kerry Bennett

Kerry Bennett is interested in media from both a journalist and parent perspective. Along with authoring articles for several family-oriented publications, she has written for Parent Previews for over 15 years. As a parent herself, she believes parents play a powerful role in teaching media literacy in their homes.