After months of angry YouTube comments and furious Tumblr posts, the film that nobody asked for and everyone somehow waited for is finally here. The all-female reboot of Ghostbusters has arrived. Unless you’re a toddler or a millennial who couldn’t be bothered to watch anything made before 2014, you know the original 1984 Ghostbusters was a massive hit that became a genuine cult classic. Four blue-collar goofs team up to take on the forces of the paranormal, and hilarity ensues. It became a staple of 1980s pop culture, which is exactly why so many people wanted a proper third film for so long. Then Harold Ramis died, and that dream effectively died with him.
Sony responded by announcing a full reboot with an all-female cast, and the internet promptly lost its mind. Feminists and anti-feminists spent months screaming at each other on social media over who was more sexist for either liking or hating the idea. Let me get this out of the way first: if you are comparing this movie directly to the 1984 original, it will not meet your expectations. It never was going to. The original had almost everything working in its favor—perfect casting, perfect timing, sharp writing, and a kind of accidental alchemy that can’t be forced. This new version was always going to be fighting an uphill battle. We begin with Kristen Wiig as Erin Gilbert, a physics teacher at Columbia University.
When a paranormal book she co-wrote years earlier resurfaces online and threatens her academic reputation, she tracks down her former partner Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) in an attempt to make the problem go away. Instead she gets pulled into a ghost-hunting adventure at an old museum… and hilarity is supposed to ensue. It mostly doesn’t. After the women are fired from their jobs for publicly claiming ghosts are real, they decide to open a ghostbusting business above a Chinese restaurant, and the plot finally shifts into gear.
About five minutes in I started thinking about the early-2000s Scooby-Doo live-action movies. The sad part is that this Ghostbusters has more in common with Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed than it does with the 1984 classic. The CGI and overall visual style frequently feel cheap and cartoonish—so much so that I half-expected the Mystery Machine to crash into the Ecto-1 and challenge the Harlem Globetrotters to a basketball game.Speaking of cartoons, this movie is a cartoon. The characters push believability off a cliff and never look back. Chris Hemsworth plays Kevin, the male version of Janine Melnitz, except his entire personality is “too stupid to breathe correctly.” His whole arc consists of being a receptionist who doesn’t know how to answer a phone. Even the villain is an idiot.
Neil Casey plays Rowan, an anti-social bellhop who decides to destroy the world essentially because people at work call him creepy. When your entire main cast consists of exaggerated morons, it becomes very hard to care about any of them as people. You don’t believe these characters would exist even inside a broad comedy.While the original Ghostbusters was relatively subtle and smart with its humor, this version takes the classic SNL approach: try to land a joke every thirty seconds. The hit rate is maybe 35 percent. With so many conflicting comedic styles colliding, it’s often unclear what tone the filmmakers were even aiming for. The movie starts out playing things relatively straight, then grows progressively less grounded as it goes on.
Kate McKinnon, playing the eccentric engineer Jillian Holtzmann (this film’s version of Egon), initially comes off more annoying than funny. But as the movie progresses she grows into the best character on screen. Leslie Jones has the strongest comedic timing of the four leads and frequently feels like the only real breath of fresh air in the clunky script. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are perfectly fine—they’re not bad, they just never quite stand out the way you hope they will. The film also takes a few direct shots at the YouTube commenters who attacked it during production, which is at least self-aware.Just as I was starting to warm up to the reboot and consider giving it a mildly positive recommendation, the third act arrived and reminded me of every problem the movie still hadn’t fixed. They keep insisting this is its own thing, separate from the original, yet roughly 60 percent of the jokes are winking references to 1984. Original cast members keep showing up for cameos.
There’s a post-credits nod to Zuul. They play the classic theme song multiple times. You can’t go more than a couple of minutes without the movie essentially turning to the audience and saying, “See? See? You remember Slimer, right?” After a while you start wondering why they didn’t just cast these four actresses as themselves in a self-aware comedy and save CinemaSins three hours of work.Ghostbusters (2016) is flawed as hell. I never fully got past the dated-looking CGI or the uneven tone. At the same time, there is just enough charm and goodwill in the performances that I couldn’t bring myself to hate it completely.
It’s not good. It’s not terrible. It’s just… there. Most people will forget it existed within a few months. The four lead actresses are talented and clearly committed; it’s almost everything surrounding them that fails to rise to the occasion. I was tempted to give this one star, but there was genuine potential here for an entertaining, joyful movie. Unfortunately, Paul Feig and this particular brand of broad SNL-style comedy were not the right combination to unlock it.
2/5
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