Ghost Rider

The Hollywood obsession with making movies based on comic books shows no sign of abating if the current roster of productions is anything to go by. The problem now is that all of those comic books that nobody outside of comic book fandom has heard of are getting made into movies, with varying success. In fairness, if there's much less weight of responsibility or expectation riding on the production, the chance of a good film are perhaps higher (Hellboy, for example). Ghost Rider is not a character about which I know much beyond the advertising blurb; a motorcycle stunt rider sells his soul to the Devil to save his Dad and by night bikes about with a flaming skull instead of an improbably hirsute Nicholas Cage. As a kind of prelude to his big 2007 assignment, Spider-Man 3, Christopher Young is at the scoring stage.

One can guess that the darker edge to Ghost Rider was a good reason for the producers to pick Young for the job, mixing it with some of the flashiness required of the comic book genre. The three opening cues define the score's main elements. Rather curiously, the story has a western edge to it and so a bit of acoustic guitar is mixed in, notably in the opening and closing cues, but this is rather overshadowed by the grinding orchestral passages that are a heavy presence throughout. It was perhaps rather inevitable that any film about a biker would contain some rock and the charmingly titled Blackheart Beat duly delivers. Young goes for a grungy background of bass guitar and percussion so it bangs along in and out of the orchestral textures. The passages for chorus and orchestra are, rather predictably, the score's best features and tracks such as the improbably titled More Sinister than Popcorn hark back to the Hellraiser scores, before segueing into a bit more rock.

Gentle moments are few, but A Thing for Karen Carpenter is very pleasant and contains the score's best melody. Sadly its appearance is fleeting, this is not a score for subtle gestures. Indeed, its lack of subtlety is perhaps the biggest weakness; so many tracks seem to churn away, often with very thick orchestrations and the rock percussion is just overkill. Quieter cues such as Chain Chariot are considerably more effective, but the action is largely disappointing and there's quite a bit of it. Unfortunately, the melodic content isn't generally terribly striking, largely buried beneath the dense orchestration. I really wanted to like Ghost Rider as Young is a fine composer, but despite several attempts, it just feels rather hollow and unmemorable, not to mention headache inducing.