Ghostbusters (2016)

It has been reported that the trailer for the 2016 version of Ghostbusters is the most "unliked" video in the history of YouTube. Indeed there has been a lot of backlash against this remake/reboot, part of which is rooted in a juvenile misogyny against the female cast, part out of the reverential place the original 1984 film occupies in the minds of many (mostly men) of a certain age, and partially because honestly the first couple of trailers for the film didn't look all that good. I came into this film a little skeptical but willing to be won over, what I got was a film that wasn't great, wasn't terrible, but rather a mixed bag.

I quite liked the first half of this film, less so the second, and did not care for the ending. There will be some spoilers here. I thought the cast worked, there was good chemistry there, and the plot was significantly enough different from the original film to be its own thing. The early sequences with the Ghostbusters first getting together were by far the most entreating, later sequences with their interacting with the mayor and his staff less so. The filmmakers evidently thought Chris Hemsworth as the Busters himbo secretary was comic gold, I thought it wore pretty thin after awhile. There are a lot of cameos in this film, including most of the living main cast of the original film, these worked unevenly. There was a strong emphasis on hitting cues and motifs from the original film, I think they tried overheard on this front including the incorporation of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. This film also channeled a surprising amount of Jim Carey's The Mask.

The movie in too many instances tried to one up the original film or "take it to 11". The end of the film was hyperactive, too much going on and not enough of it sufficiently grounded or earned. There are new Ghostbuster weapons which I thought were quite gimmicky, you have scenes where there are ghost corpses littering the ground, I mean what does that even mean, how do you kill a ghost? I did not like the look of the special effects, far too cartoony, one the things that worked so well in the original film is the degree to which they played the ghost characters more or less straight.

Paul Feig, who co-wrote and directed the film and whose previous work pretty much made Melissa McCarthy a star has an excellent understanding of pace and film structure, and on the whole I can't really fault this film on that front. Everything here is in its place and there is a place for everything, plot points are introduced when they should be and sufficiently developed to make sense, characters are given sufficient backstory and motivation so the character development is good, and the screen time for the members of the ensemble cast is pretty well balanced. Structurally things worked, with the arguable exception of the ending, the film was often funny, again more so towards the beginning, but ironically for a film about ghost catching this whole thing lacked soul. I felt like I was watching a movie from a parallel universe, all the parts where there but the sum total was lacking. You can't just reverse engineer a hit like 1984's Ghostbusters and expect it to not come off as merely the knock off it is, however fine a knockoff that may be. **1/2