Trailer Stash The new trailer for Ghost Rider deconstructed. By Sara Brady Icon by Lisa Martin

When I'm having a really lousy week, I often think that seeing someone get his head bashed in, or maybe burst into flames, will bring a smile to my face. It turns out I was wrong.

This teaser trailer for the Marvel Comics-derived Ghost Rider has been around for awhile, and let me tell you, it doesn't get more awesome on repeat viewings.

It opens on a motorcycle stuntman revving his engine and getting ready for a big stunt. A close-up of the man in the helmet reveals that Johnny Blaze is played by none other than Nicolas Cage. He zooms down a ramp to make his jump, over half a dozen military helicopters with their blades whirring. They appear to be in... the Superdome? How long ago was this filmed?

Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze in Ghost Rider. Click here to watch the trailer.

"You should be taking a dirt nap after that rag doll today," we hear Donal Logue telling Cage as the motorcycle barely clears the end ramp. But tragedy: Blaze goes over the handlebars of the cycle and his head hits the front wheel with a particularly juicy smashed-melon sound. "I got lucky," he tells Donal nonchalantly, with none of the spectacular maxillofacial damage one would expect from a man who just made out with his front tire. We see that the crash ended with Blaze sliding into a wall rather anticlimactically. "Luck don't cover it, J.B.," Donal continues, as the music swells portentously (or pretentiously), "You got an angel looking out for you."

"Maybe it's something else," Cage gruffs, looking out the window as lightning flashes, turning his face to a skull. This is all so boringly important I can hardly stand it.

Titles flash in to try to explain Blaze's backstory as the camera pans over... Emperor Palpatine? No, seriously, it looks like he's there. I'm confused. These titles don't do a very good job of exposition, but the main point seems to be: Someone died. It sucked. Now Johnny can't feel hot water. Boo hoo.

No, actually, Blaze traded his soul to the devil. In return he ended up with the crazy-mean "spirit of vengeance" glued to his face so that, as a man sounding remarkably like Sam Elliott, tells us, "He'll be normal during the day, but at night... in the presence of evil... the Rider takes over." Various scabrous-looking evil things growl at the camera as we see Cage walking with his feet on fire and then screaming to the heavens, but perhaps he's just peeved that those weird zippers on his jacket sleeves snagged his arm hairs.

Johnny Blaze's Hellcycle.

I'd like to take this moment to address Mark Steven Johnson, this film's auteur and the person responsible for both Daredevil and, by extension, Elektra. Dear Mark, Batman is awesome because he is dark and tortured and also a billionaire with a suave butler and occasionally he looks like Christian Bale, dripping wet. His weird obsession with bats is not what earns him $200 million at the domestic box office. Maybe there's a story here underneath all the crazy bursting into flames and whining about dead mentors or whatever and my patience will be rewarded with a complex and mesmerizing story of the darkness of the human soul, but if that's the case, maybe it would have been nice to put some of that juicy complexity in the trailer, huh?!

Johnny, his head now totally a flaming skull, walks toward Eva Mendes, who should have a long talk with her agent about movies where she's going to decorate the set. I'd be willing to bet that Sony wanted her in this movie because they think women like her and will therefore agree to go see a movie about a guy on a motorcycle with his head on fire over Valentine's Day, but the folks at Fox probably said that about Jennifer Garner's participation in Daredevil. Eva is, for some reason, standing in front of a huge force of cops with guns pointed at Johnny, which is, you know, kind of idiotic.

"I'm the only one who can walk in both worlds," Cage husks over footage of Blaze, head afire, riding his big old flaming motorcycle with a cowboy who is also on fire. Could this get any gayer?

And now the trailer is mercifully over. Maybe this crash and burn (heh) will convince the studios that they have in fact scraped the bottom of the comic-book superhero barrel, and they'll go back to throwing money at Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis in action movies. Wait, that already happened. Okay, we're screwed.