Ghostbusters

Dir: Paul Feig

2016

**

Before I review Paul Feig's Ghostbusters it is important that I address some issues. The film became infamous before anyone had actually seen it, before it was even finished. The original Ghostbusters is treasured among fans and is the best supernatural comedy of all time and one of the 1980's best loved films. I was going to say it has something of a cult following but that would be woefully inaccurate, Ghostbusters has a very mainstream and rather large following. It's really not the sort of thing you should think about remaking lightly. Paul Feig, who I'm really not much of a fan of, decided to remake/reboot the franchise with a whole new, female cast and hoped that everyone would be happy with it. Now, if you're going to remake/reboot something then you should do so with a balance of old and new, keeping true to the source material but also bringing something new to the table. Replacing the original characters was arguably the right thing to do, changing their sex really isn't a big deal in my opinion but trying to emulate and improve on the original and much loved characters has a distinct bite of arrogance and impertinent audacity about it that clearly got on many people's nerves, mine included. Most remakes/reboots are utterly pointless and downright lazy, Ghostbusters 2016 falls into this category in spectacular fashion but in order to be balanced, I shall put this to one side. 1984's Ghostbusters was sort of born from Saturday Night Live, or at least from the comedy writing of the time (it was intended as a vehicle for SNL stars Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi) so it does feel right that it has certain SNL traits. However, SNL in the 1980s is something very different from SNL in the 2010s. Ghostbusters 2016 is rarely funny. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are the main characters of the reboot and while McCarthy is notably toned-down, both struggle to raise a smile and personally I don't think Wiig has ever been so lost in movie. The script is dreadful, and I mean dreadful. Example; "Can I bring my Cat to work"? asks Chris Hemsworth's rather simple character Kevin during his job interview. "You want to bring your Cat to work?" ask the team. "No, I want to bring my Dog to work, his name is Mike Hat". That really is as good as the script gets folks, it is utterly depressing that someone green-lit it and thought it was funny. The whole film feels like a poor imitation, largely because it is, but what makes it worse is the continual self-referencing to the negative hype the film attracted before filming. While it was refreshing to have a whole new story, it's not a particularly interesting one and the film has none of the genuinely scary scenes that made the original work so well. Ghostbusters 2 gets a lot of hate but it is a masterpiece in comparison. The cameo performances from the original cast range from brilliant to awful. Bill Murray's role is a little strange, suggestive of how he feels about the franchise in general maybe? Dan Aykroyd delivers a killer line but his appearance is disappointingly fleeting, Annie Potts' is a joy and poor old Ernie Hudson is side-lined once again. The Harold Ramis tribute was a little pathetic considering he co-created the franchise and was much loved. Sigourney Weaver's cameo is the only truly interesting character out of the cameos but that is mainly thanks to the link to Kate McKinnon's character, Jillian Holtzmann. This is because Kate McKinnon's Jillian Holtzmann is, by far, the best thing about the new film. Leslie Jones' Patty Tolan feels awfully like a token character in a film we're told breaks down barriers but she is probably the second best thing about the film. There were a couple of scenes that made me smile, Slimer stealing ECTO-1 and raking it around New York and Andy Garcia's Mayor Bradley being offended at being compared to the Mayor in Jaws but pretty much everything else was underwhelming. I hated the Ozzy Osbourne cameo, the ghosts were suspiciously Tim Burtonesque and not very good, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man rip-off ending was horrible (HORRIBLE) and never, ever, in the history of film has a film benefited from having a scene set during a music concert, especially not this film. As a remake/reboot is pales in comparison, as a stand-alone film it is below average with only a couple of likable features.