Ghost Rider is the easily one of the best comic-book-to-film adaptations ever, earning a place alongside the Spiderman and X-Men series. Writer/director Mark Stephen Johnson, who also directed and wrote the screenplay for the less successful Daredevil, was clearly inspired by his source material and brings a giddy excitement to the many scenes of motorcycle madness and mayhem.

After The Crow, Ghost Rider is the most gothic of the comic book adaptations to date, leaping back and forth between contemporary and wild west aesthetics. Even the costumes by the Academy Award winning designer Lizzy Gardiner display an exceptionally tasteful gothic sense.

After an adrenoline charged title sequence, Ghost Rider begins laying the groundwork for the story to come in a pair of flashbacks, the first of which introduces the legend of the Ghost Rider and his relationship to the Lord of Hell, named in Faustian fashion as Mephistopheles and played with perfect malevolence by Peter Fonda. The Ghost Rider is described in voice-over as the Devil's bounty hunter, bound to serve as the result of selling his soul.

In a second flashback, this time to the era of motorcycle stuntmen like Evel Knievel, a father and son team of cyclists called Barton and Johnny Blaze are performing similar stunts in a small-town carnival. When circumstances arise that make Johnny a willing mark for the treacherous Mephistopheles, a devil's bargain forces the younger Blaze to leave his life and loves behind.

As the story catches up to the present day, Johnny Blaze (now played by Nicolas Cage) has become a pop culture icon, renowned for cheating death in spectacular jump crashes. When a supernatural rival of Mephistopheles gathers a posse of elemental demons to usurp power and claim dominion over the Earth, Johnny is called upon to become the Ghost Rider to prevent a demonic coup.

Part of the darkness of Ghost Rider lies in its refusal to inject the power of God or angels into the struggle between mankind and the machinations of the infernal powers. The story's acknowledgents of bits and pieces of demonic lore in lines of dialogue and visual symbolism also adds to the fun while grounding the comic book fantasy in familiar legend.

One of the often voiced critiques of films of this type is that they resemble large scale video games. Mark Stephen Johnson seems to have fun taking a who-gives-a-damn poke at such critics in an obvious nod to gaming fanaticism and by several times offering a first-person point of view from the HellCycle that adds to the immersive effect of the visuals.

Criticisms of Ghost Rider are easy to come by, like Nicolas Cage's loopy eccentricities, the deviations that the movie takes from the original story, and the changed appearance of certain characters... but why bother?

It's easy to enjoy the comic book fun that Ghost Rider brings to the screen, to the point that all else is forgiven, if not forgotten.