Jason Gardner reviews the film

Superpowers are cool. No doubt about it. Who wouldn't want the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound or have heat ray vision, super strength, flight, to read peoples minds or to have the ability to make people suffer the torment that they've put other people through? OK so maybe that last one isn't on many people's wish list but it's a super power not to be messed with as the Ghost Rider proves in the latest cinematic outing from Marvel Comics.

Nicolas Cage plays Johnny Blaze, a young stunt rider who goes down to the crossroads, featured from legends of yore, to sell his soul to the devil. The deal is that in return for Johnny's servitude the Devil will heal his father of cancer. Eventually Johnny becomes the Ghost Rider - a crowd wowing trick motorcyclist by day and a vengeful demon by night complete with hell bike and a blazing skull for a head.

His job is to be the devil's bounty hunter: responsible for tracking down renegade demons and sending them back to Hades. And the aforementioned Super Power - the 'penance stare' - is just one of the powers in his arsenal that helps him bring criminals to justice.

The stare provides some of the most powerful moments in the film. A would be mugger is transfixed by the Rider's gaze and when he hears the immortal line 'Your soul is stained with the blood of innocents. Feel their pain' is forced to endure, all at once, the suffering that his crimes have caused other people.

It's this form of rough justice that lets us know that although Ghost Rider looks demonic, as far as the film is concerned, he's really on the side of the angels. His boss might be Satan but he's definitely a disgruntled employee. And (spoiler alert) at the end of the story he's able to break free from the devil because he sold his soul not out of selfish ambition but in order to save another's life.

It's a great film - largely because the cast and director don't take their subject movie too seriously - their approach harks back to hammer house of horror and B-movie monster outings and it works.

And it also dredges up some pretty important issues.

First up, what is true justice? Now the Ghost Rider is all about justice of a kind - making sure that the guilty get punished. In effect his job is to bring Hell to earth - making people suffer in equal and direct correlation to the suffering they've caused others. But this is more like the justice of Karma than the justice of God. Karma says you get what you deserve - whatever pain you inflict will be inflicted on you. God's justice is tempered with grace - that you get what you don't deserve. Because of God's grace we don't, ultimately, have to pay the price of the pain we cause others.

Secondly the film deals with the idea of legend. In dealing with ideas of Satan, Hell, selling your soul, it acknowledges that it's feeding off stories that have been around for centuries. But its conclusion about the nature of those stories is that they are only legend, only mythology. And, as the narrator says at one point, legends are there to help us make sense of the big mysteries we don't understand.

But there's another view of such 'fables' - that they have strong cultural resonance not because they help us deal with the mystery but because they point to the deeper truth that lies behind the universe. As C S Lewis once described them they are 'little echoes of the divine story.'

So strong within the Biblical narrative, and 'echoed' within Ghost Rider is the reality that we will one day be called to account for our actions. When that happens though, we won't be judged by a vengeful spirit intent on punishment but by a God whose grace has given us the greatest opportunity to have the slate wiped clean.