There’s a scene midway through the Ghostbusters reboot when Kristen Wiig’s Erin Gilbert is talking to Andy Garcia’s Mayor Bradley of New York about the impending doom about to befall the city, and she tells him, “Don’t be like the Jaws mayor,” and he responds angrily, “Don’t ever compare me to the Jaws mayor.” I found irony in this, as I could imagine the original 1984 Ghostbusters film one day saying, “Don’t ever compare me to the 2016 Ghostbusters.”
I went into Ghostbusters confident that I could evaluate it on its own merits, even though I am an unapologetic mega-fan of the original 1984 film. I had hopes that this new film could surprise me — and the world — as it cast four of the funniest ladies on the planet, and using much better technology for the effects, this film could have been something to behold. Instead, we are left with an insipid, poorly plotted, unfunny mess of a film that begs you to judge it on its own merits, while at the same time demands that you know everything about the original film to understand what is happening.
Joining Kristen Wiig in the ensemble is Melissa McCarthy as Abby Yates, a scientist, I guess — one line of dialogue is used to explain her credentials, who used to be best friends with Erin, but they had a falling out. Abby has replaced her one-time friend with Jillian Holzmann (Kate McKinnon), an inventor, I guess — again, no further explanation made, who is little off center (i.e. crazy). After a ghost appears in an old New York mansion, Abby, Erin, and Holtzmann decide to become paranormal investigators to fulfill a childhood dream, since they now have proof that ghosts are real.
Across town, Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) works for the MTA in Queens, and though she’s a people person who knows all about the history of New York City, no one ever sees her. One day, a weird fellow (Neil Casey) spouts some gobbledegook about the fourth apocalypse and how he’s uniting the vectors to break the seal, and then he mysteriously disappears into a tunnel. Patty follows him into the tunnels and finds the ghost of an electrocuted prisoner. She seeks out the new team of paranormal investigators for help with the ghost problem and we have a movie.
There is enough tweaking of the origins to help try and separate this Ghostbusters from any that came before, the problem is, they go from four ladies and their ignorant, boy toy receptionist, Kevin (Chris Hemsworth) to suited up, fully loaded Ghostbusters, complete with their own Ecto-1, battling ghosts with little to no exposition to explain the jump. Director Paul Feig is more concerned with cramming as many cameos into this thing as he can — including most of the original Ghostbusters cast — than actually trying to tell a unique, funny, visual story, one that could stand on its own merit.
And don’t get me wrong, there are some spectacular visuals at work here. The ghosts have never looked better, and some are even frightening. The problem is, visually, Ghostbusters feels like a South Korean spoof of the 1984 film, with tremendous colors and eye-popping effects, but silliness and nonsensical dialogue everywhere else. This could have been dubbed in Korean dialect and I would have enjoyed it as much as I did in english.
The script by Katie Dippold (The Heat) and Paul Feig never gets around to explaining anything. The squirrelly guy from the subway is sick of being a bully victim, so he inexplicably builds a contraption and matching devices that will raise the dead all across New York so he can get revenge. We’re told that, not shown. He’s just a lowly hotel worker with the infinite knowledge to create dimensional-shattering equipment. The Ghostbusters themselves, with no money and no explained know-how, somehow create gadgets and equipment to bust ghosts, because they show up in that stuff. No explanation. The script is one of the weakest for any summer film, much less one rebooting a certified classic. And while you could almost guess the jokes (woman’s biology jokes, race jokes, suffragette jokes), the script still felt very flat and forced.
There was some good things to come out of here. Leslie Jones is stellar as Patty — the only person given any kind of gravitas to know what she’s doing in the entire film, and Kate McKinnon is so zany that she practically pulls out laughs — or the very least smiles — in her utter weirdness. Wiig and McCarthy play an unfunny female Laurel and Hardy, essentially the exact same roles they always play. Wiig is demure, and small; McCarthy is loud and hungry for scenery. These two comedic powerhouses actually bring the film down.
Unfortunately, not much else works here, and the whole production never rises above anything more than a cheap knock-off of much better films. The third act of Ghostbusters feels incredibly rushed, as if Feig had too much budget and had to use it lose it, so he blew the wad on eye candy, while leaving the plot to starve in some dark, uncolored corner. The climax — which, for some reason features Chris Hemsworth leading New York’s finest in a game of “Simon Sez” — serves only to wrap up what little story there is, again absolutely refusing to do anything unique and instead relying on the older film for misguided inspiration. The conflicts are light and easily resolved, and the mind-numbing cameos (including big actors in tiny parts) break up any momentum that the film has. In fact, this felt a lot like last summer’s Pixels, which was also a disappointing Sony film that had so much potential, so maybe this falls on the shoulders of the studio head who’s green lighting these cinematic mistakes.
Ghostbusters could have been something special. It could been so much more if it had been a sequel and not a reboot, but instead, it chose the wrong path and ends up being a mediocre mess of a film. A stellar, incredibly talented cast and an able director couldn’t even pull off the equivalent of a slow pitch right over the plate, and the end results aren’t funny, or scary. Just sad. If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, don’t bother to call. They’ll just let it ring.
Ghostbusters is rated PG-13 and is in theaters on July 15.
