Ghostbusters (2016) – Review

This review will contain mild spoilers

This movie was always going to be at the center of some form of controversy. The original is a classic, with millions of fans from every demographic. It expertly blended atmospheres of creepy and funny, unsettling and charming, into a cinematic amalgamation that was considered vital enough for inclusion in the United States’ National Film Registry. If you didn’t watch Ghostbusters growing up, your childhood was incomplete. That’s a scientific fact, right up there with the confirmed existence of free-roaming class-5 vapors.

Even putting forward the idea of a sequel was troublesome. It languished in development hell for several years. A video game was released in 2009 that had as its story what was essentially supposed to be the storyline of Ghostbusters 3. The success of this game, critically and commercially, indicated to Sony, the owners of the Ghostbusters Intellectual Property, that interest in the franchise was still strong. As plans were discussed for a third film, Harold Ramis died in 2014. This, along with Bill Murray’s reluctance to come back, were catalysts for the upcoming movie’s change of status from a sequel to reboot, starring four women.

I’m not 100% up-to-date on the origins and extent of the controversy surrounding this film. I’m not here to tell you that it doesn’t have anything to do regarding the genders of the lead characters or that it has everything to do with that. What I can tell you is that the film was surrounded by an overabundance of controversy and criticism, some legitimate, some not, since its announcement. The flames of this metaphorical fire were only stoked when the first trailer was released.

And by stoked, I mean someone forgot to tell Sony that the water bucket they were using to try and put out the fire was for some reason filled with gasoline. What resulted was a catastrophe of negativity as the trailer racked up the most dislike for any trailer on YouTube (as of this writing, it sits at 965,553 dislikes). To be fair… it wasn’t a very good trailer. After seeing it, I didn’t feel a pressing desire to go on opening night and watch the film. The subsequent trailers were noticeably better, but not good enough to get me invested. Sony really needs a better marketing team.

So, here we are. It’s finally hit theaters. Is it a genuinely funny and good film, or do the trailers do it justice?

It treads somewhere in the middle, actually.

As mentioned before, the film stars four women as the Ghostbusters. Melissa McCarthy as Abby Yates, Kristen Wiig as Erin Gilbert, Kate McKinnon as Jillian Holtzmann, and Leslie Jones as Patty Tolan. The film also stars Chris Hemsworth as Kevin “the hot receptionist.” Hemsworth does a good job, but his character has no depth. Every appearance he has is marked by one joke: Kevin is stupid. Unrealistically so. It’s implied he has a social life and friends, but this is flatly impossible. Kevin is not the airheaded yet optimistic freshman in high school that thinks Romeo and Juliet is actually a love story, nor is he the unfortunate adult whose inherent shyness resulted in a socially stunted upbringing. He’s not even the dim-witted jock that forgoes his chance to listen in class because “school is dumb.” No, Kevin somehow manages to combine the most egregious examples of human awkwardness, ignorance, and a genuine stupidity which precludes him from ever overcoming the first two traits, all in one. A shoestring, a shovel, and the lint in your pocket would all outscore him on an IQ test by virtue of being unable to score a negative number, whereas Kevin’s results were burned because it dragged down the national average 2 whole points.

As a receptionist, there were only so many things he could do wrong, and he cycled through most of them in his first appearance.

The four main character are just about as shallow. Abby Yates is a True Believer who, along with Jillian Holtzmann, studies the supernatural at a community college. Erin Gilbert, a physicist who vies for tenure at Columbia University. And Patty Tolan, a streetwise worker for New York City’s subway system. Out of all these characters, we only get a backstory for one, Erin, who saw a ghost when she was young and was traumatized by both the event and people’s disbelief in her story. Abby’s backstory is tied into Erin’s as a childhood friend who believed her ghost story. Erin’s core desire is to be accepted as a professional. When she realizes that advocating for the existence of the supernatural won’t get her that, she abandons her beliefs and her friendship with Abby, who in the meantime sets out to prove scientifically that ghosts exist.

What’s unfortunate is that the dynamics of Erin’s trauma are never fully explored. Once the ghosts start to appear, she brazenly throws off the weight of those who judge her for her beliefs. For someone who has been practicing self-denial for years in order to get ahead, this seems like a very quick turnaround. Throughout the movie, the puzzle pieces of Erin’s and Abby’s character arcs were seemingly switched on accident, and what it seems that Erin would do (for example, show restraint) Abby does instead, and vice versa. Even their patterns of dialogue sometimes become jumbled.

Patty doesn’t have a backstory; she gets a unique trait, that of being a history buff, which comes in handy when uncovering evidence. Leslie Jones’ performance is appreciably charming and makes up for her lack of development.

And, finally, we have Jillian Holtzmann just there being quirky. She’s defined entirely by how eccentric she is. She invents most of the team’s tech, but this can’t really be considered depth as it merely plays into the “quirky scientist/inventor” trope. There’s some implication she’s been deprived of friendship due to her odd mannerisms, but it comes entirely too late at the end of the film and nothing is made of it; in fact, the revelation itself is supposed to be humorous.

Neil Casey plays the film’s villain, Rowan North. He, too, suffers from a lack of depth. His motivations amount to “I was bullied constantly.” Surprisingly, in this case, that seems a justifiable reason. That’s not a positive, though: the film goes out of its way to portray every interaction Rowan has with another human being as unpleasant. We hear people talk about him behind his back, his boss calls him a weirdo to his face and his coworkers seem only too happy at the prospect of him being arrested. In a world where even perceived social injustices can lead to suicide or worse, such an existence where the perception aligns perfectly with reality seems unfathomably cruel. But don’t worry, the film never hesitates to angle on Casey’s unsettling expressions in order that you hate him.

I suppose that’s the movie’s biggest failing: The characters. Everything else worked to the degree that it was supposed to. But the characters weren’t there. What we get is sufficient if you turn your brain to low-power mode and aren’t expecting too much. Once you do that, you’ll find yourself watching a nice tale of friends beating impossible odds, with fun and mishaps aplenty along the way.

The special effects, while derided when the trailer was first released, didn’t seem all that bad to me. I was averse initially of seeing the movie in 3D, but my opinion quickly changed once I donned the plastic glasses. Also, because the only available showing was in 3D, but whatever.

 

In summary, the movie is like just about any remake: if you expect it to live up to the legacy of the original, you’re in for a major disappointment. Ghostbusters has elements of the original in spades, and I’m sure advocates for it could point to those similarities all day either in an attempt to bring the remake up to par with the original, or to bring the original down. Whatever its flaws, and despite them, the Ghostbusters of 1984 have charmed their way into the hearts of more than one generation of movie fans. That kind of lightning only strikes once. The thunderbolt that the remake wanted to hit you with has all the shock of static.

 

Final Rating: 6.5/10