Well, it took him six long months, but Nicolas Cage has finally appeared in something goofier than The Wicker Man.

In Ghost Rider, Cage plays Johnny Blaze, a stunt motorcyclist who performs the most dangerous tricks ever seen to cope with the death of his father during a show in Johnny's youth, the day after Johnny makes a deal with Mephistopheles to cure his father's cancer, the day before Johnny's planned elopement with his girlfriend, Roxanne. [Deep breath]. Nowadays, Johnny can't die because Mephistopheles has been protecting him because he needs Johnny to be the Ghost Rider, his personal henchmen, to track down his son Blackheart, who is trying to find the MacGuffin Contract before Mephistopheles does, and all this happens on the very day that Roxanne re-enters Johnny's life.

It is time for the Powers That Be to recognise that just because a comic book character exists, that is not inherently justification for building a movie franchise around him (or the rare her). Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four are the cornerstones of our modern mythology; you get a free pass on making films about those characters (it would, however, be nice if those films didn't suck quite so hard quite so often). The Hulk, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Captain America, the Flash, Daredevil: these characters are fairly well-known and you can probably get away with it.

But for the remainder of the vast hordes of the Marvel and DC universes, you need to have a pretty damn great script in place, because there's no cultural ownership of these characters that you can trade on. (Full disclosure: I am, admittedly, very excited about the rumoured Dr. Strange movie). Ghost Rider is not a significant character; he is famous only among Marvel junkies. And to be completely honest, he's not particularly interesting: "Satan's vigilante" is a notion, not a story, and giving him a fire-spitting bike from Hell is just a frippery.

I think that I am letting myself get afield of the movie per se. So let me return: Nicolas Cage plays a stunt biker who turns into leather clad monster with a flaming skull for a head. At all other times he does a variant on his notoriously shaky Elvis impersonation that for whatever reason he is so very proud of. This is exactly as clownish as you think it is, unless you are one of those people who really likes Nic Cage. Haha, I tease: nobody still likes Nic Cage!

Right, so Cage's performance actually manages to make this character more of a cartoon than "stunt biker with a flaming skull head" already sounds. The best superhero movies, without exception, are buoyed by a strong and sympathetic lead: Christopher Reeve, Tobey Maguire, Christian Bale. All of whom are united by their total lack of Cage's Elvis accent. I think that I'm allowing myself to think too hard about Cage's Elvis accent. Certainly, I am thinking about it more than Cage or director Mark Steven Johnson (of the rancid Daredevil) ever did.

The film surrounding Cage's balls-out caricature of a human being is none too good either. The plot, as I implied at the start, is equal parts pointless and contrived, but I'm willing to spot it that on the grounds that it's a comic book movie. What I'm not willing or able to forgive is its pretention; I don't know the comic, but the movie is of the very sincere opinion that the story of the Ghost Rider is in the great tradition of Western legend. This is demonstrated in the only way it truly could be: by casting Sam Elliott as the narrator who informs us that this is a great Western legend, in roughly those exact words. I would pity Sam Elliott if he were not so anxious to whore out his Western gravitas at every opportunity.

The non-Cage cast is mostly just there. In particular, Eva Mendes as Roxanne has nothing to do but wear low-cut dresses, and she does so with great aplomb. The only interesting actor is Peter Fonda, as the devil; perhaps I misuse "interesting," because all that I mean is that it is "interesting" that he is in the film. And a little bit embarassing. And for some reason, it kept giving me Easy Rider flashbacks.

Technically, it's a failure. The CGI is video-game quality, and overused; there are many shots of demons whose face briefly turns gross-looking with a shock sting on the soundtrack, and it's meant I suppose to be scary. Mostly it just underscores how hyper and MTVified everything is, from the X-treem Ghost Rider action set pieces, down to the truly repellent cover of "Ghost Riders in the Sky" that accompanies the credits.

This is all very bad, and it's very bad in a grand campy way. Which is also a nice development form The Wicker Man, which I just wanted to end. Indeed, Ghost Rider is certainly the funniest movie I've seen in 2007, from Cage's bizaare accent to each and every new plot "twist" to Fonda's...presence.

But here's something that's not so funny. The film did huge business in its opening weekend, and that can only mean two things. The first is that American filmgoers are uncompromisingly stupid. No news there. The second, though, is that somewhere in the corridors of Sony Entertainment, the details are being inked on Ghost Rider 2: Mo' Ghost Mo' Rider, or whatever. If that doesn't put the fear of God in you, nothing can.