So, at night when evil's around, Blaze becomes ablaze, which melts his face into a flaming skull and leaves his clothes amazingly unsinged.  The gimmick might work in the comics, but here it's quite amusing.  A talking, burning skeleton with a sand-papery voice that sounds like he's gargling with salt water just doesn't make a hero worth standing behind.  His special powers: twirling a chain around and having the ability to turn all the evil back on to the doer with a stare.  Oh, and he rides a fiery motorcycle, too.  That can go up buildings.  And the chain can lasso a helicopter and pull it down to speaking distance.  Right.

If fire is Ghost Rider's specialty, then his competition is Blackheart and his three demonic henchmen, who partially take the form of air, water, and earth.  If you like this and other kinds of ham-fisted philosophical/theological allusions, there are plenty more here.  Blaze reads Faust on his downtime, that pact between him and the devil takes place at a literal crossroads, fire rains down from the heavens, etc.  It's a lot of hokum, really, and this is what Johnson plays the straightest.  Pay no mind that those elemental henchmen are incredibly useless (Ghost Rider takes each of them out so quickly that they're fights shouldn't even be called fights), the idea of a fireball (instead of snowball) fight comes instantly to mind in the climax, and that, while Blaze must stitch himself up after being stabbed as Ghost Rider, there are seemingly no physical repercussions to his being repeatedly shot.  Nicolas Cage gets the tortured lackadaisical attitude down right, but he's way too solemn.  On the reverse end, Wes Bentley is too far gone as Blackheart.  Peter Fonda finds a happy medium, hamming it up fine as the devil; if there were any scenery to chew in the Texas wasteland, he'd be chewing it.

I might sound tough on the movie, but it isn't terrible.  There are just a lot of ridiculous elements at play here and not enough winking at them.  Ghost Rider is potentially funny stuff, but in Johnson's hands, it's just mediocre superhero fodder.