He traded his soul to save a loved one, but when it came time to barter for a decent script Johnny Blaze (aka Ghost Rider) was too busy throttling through the streets of Melbourne.  Or should that be the streets of Somewheresville, Texas?

If a Hollywood film crew need a cow, so the saying goes, they find a horse and paint it black and white.  In Ghost Rider writer/director Mark Steven Johnson doesn't bother with the paint job: his movie is set in a large Texas city but Melbournians will clearly recognise prominent locations including Telstra Dome, Flinders Lane and Southbank.  The more intelligent members of the audience will then compute that the movie wasn't actually shot in the great US of A, just as Nicholas Cage didn't actually rip off his skin and light up his skeleton to play Marvel's iconic highway-to-hell superhero. 

After discovering that his father (Chris Cooper) has terminal cancer Johnny Blaze (played as a teenager by Matt Long) is visited and propositioned by old hoof heels himself.  The devil comes in the form of a cane-tapping Peter Fonda, who looks like he needs to take a nap and gives his best impersonation of an actor who forget to set his alarm clock.  Johnny agrees to fork over his soul in exchange for his father's health, and the next morning his father wakes up feeling peachy - only to die hours later when a motorcycle stunt goes wrong.  It's a no refund, no exchanges deal; Johnny should have read the fine print before dripping blood along the dotted line. 

Older and none the wiser, adult Johnny (Nicholas Cage) is the world's greatest motorcycle daredevil.  Fonda again sleep walks into his life, announcing that it's time to capitalise on the deal. 

"It's like watching an investment that keeps growing and growing until the day you cash it in," he tells Johnny, though I assume Fonda is actually talking about Nicholas Cage's career.  From then on Johnny becomes a demonic werewolf on wheels, transforming every evening into Ghost Rider, whose job it is to kill demons (with rather little effort) and collect nasty souls who've slipped through the cracks of the Devil's ledgers.  Johnny's love interest is Roxanne, who grows from a cornpone floral dressed young yokel (Raquel Alessi) to a solarium tanned, impossible to believe TV reporter played by Eva Mendes.

Johnson, who is adept at manufacturing movie migraines after writing and directing Daredevil, sets his co-ordinates for a guiltily enjoyable no-brainer and misfires considerably. 

The titular protagonist of Ghost Rider raises an irresistibly silly hypothetical question: what if the devil's bounty hunter is actually a really nice guy when you get to know him?  Sadly the movie doesn't do anything to nut out that concept.  In Terry Pratchett's novel Hogwash Death was shanghaied into playing Santa Claus, and that's a reversal of the same idea: that a character is forced to tackle a job diametrically opposed to their beliefs.  A lot of mileage can be cranked out of the dichotomy between obligations and ideals, but Ghost Rider isn't interested in anything that might encourage a subtext. 

Johnson's screenplay connects action scenes that seem more like scavenged dregs from other movies, and his direction prefers fleeting images to set pieces and atmosphere.  Splashes of glossily cultivated hocus give the film the occasional, mildly thrilling ring of visual audacity: watching Ghost Rider vertically hoon up a skyscraper is fun and watching him go down is even better.  The thrill however is quickly lived, and so are all the movie's splashes of CGI panache.  It's obvious that Johnson wants to have some fun with the material but can't decide whether he's shooting for parody or deadpan - so you can't take Ghost Rider seriously and can't have much fun with it either.  I kept waiting for a nicely timed self-effacing gag, like a porky highway cop that pulls our demonic hooning hero over and attempts to issue him a speeding ticket, but no such luck.  The movie is only funny when it's being brutally genuine: "I'm the only one who can walk in both worlds. I'm Ghost Rider."

That may so, but who really cares?