Review: Ghostbusters
Certainly no film in recent history has been barraged with such backlash as Paul Feig's all-female remake/reboot of Ivan Reitman's 1984 Ghostbusters. Its trailer is the most disliked in YouTube history, angry fans have flooded IMDB with negative user ratings. Is all the animus warranted? Certainly not if one has actually seen the movie, which is thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, managing not only to pay homage to the original but stand apart from it.
Ghouls and giggles have been such strange bedfellows that few movies have managed to pull off the pairing with aplomb, which contributes to the enduring appeal of the original. One may have to look as far back as the Bowery Boys' 1946 Spook Busters and the 1940 Bob Hope vehicle The Ghost Breakers to find comedies whose kicks were borne out of slapstick interactions with the paranormal and which were not outright parodies such as 2000's Scary Movie. Feig and co-screenwriter Katie Dippold set the scary-funny tone from the opening sequence. A guide (Zach Woods) tours a group around a haunted mansion, pointing out its notable features such as the room where P.T. Barnum got the idea to enslave elephants for entertainment, the Irish-proof security fence, and the door behind which one of the mansion's inhabitants was locked for all of her days. The house has been tricked out to scare the customers but, after everyone has gone, the guide discovers to his distress that there is indeed a ghost and she is not a very friendly one.
The film soon introduces us to the women that will comprise the ghost-fighting squad. Longtime friends Dr. Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) and Dr. Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), whose friendship has been strained since Erin distanced herself from a book they co-authored about paranormal phenomena, are thrown back together when they hear of the incident at the mansion. Erin is the prim and proper tenure-bound disbeliever, whilst Abby is the gung-ho obsessive. Both are reduced to giddy teenyboppers when they come face-to-face with the mansion's ghost who proceeds to greet Erin with a seemingly endless spew of green slime. Their unabashed excitement - both over the encounter itself and the fact that their long-held but much-ridiculed convictions have finally been validated - is one of the film's many highlights.
Kicked out of their respective universities, Erin and Abby decide to form the Department of Metaphysical Examination with the headquarters based above the Chinese restaurant from which Erin exasperatedly receives her takeaways ("We're a floor above you and it still takes you an hour to deliver," she admonishes). Completing the quartet are the eccentric Dr. Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and streetwise MTA worker Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones). Saturday Night Live stars McKinnon and Jones arguably steal the movie from their more well-known co-stars.
Jones delivers many of the film's funniest - and sometimes most cutting - lines. "I don't know if it's a race thing or a lady thing, but I'm pissed," she announces after concertgoers fail to catch her when she jumps off the stage. "He's the third scariest thing on that train," she cracks about a ghost that's hopped a Queens-bound train. As the newly dubbed Ghostbusters make their way through the theater's backstage area in search of the reported ghosts, she comes across a room full of mannequins and promptly opts out of entering "the room full of nightmares" before one of the mannequins comes up behind her in one of the film's creepiest moments.
McKinnon, meanwhile, may not necessarily have lines that are funny in and of themselves but her attitude and delivery, a potent mixture of the darkly cynical and the earnestly curious, spin comic gold out of the simplest word. The rousing slow-motion sequence in which she blasts her way through a group of ghosts like a boss, is a prime example of the sustained hilarity and the genre-upending that this film delivers in spades.
Individually and collectively, the actresses are all in fine fettle, proving that girls can kick back and have as much fun as the boys. One could reasonably argue that the filmmakers haven't taken the feminist spin too far, but that would be a niggle as would any gripes about there being too many callbacks to the original film. Yes, the film is chock full of references to the original, but it's not wholly beholden to it. Most of the original cast, save for the late Harold Ramis (who appears in the form of a bust at Erin's university) and Rick Moranis (who declined to interrupt his retirement), pop up in generally delight-inducing cameos as do many other performers (including one rock star for whom hallucinations are part of the everyday). Chris Hemsworth, as the ladies' amusingly clueless receptionist Kevin, expands on the comic chops that have been briefly glimpsed in the Thor and Avengers movies and the execrable Vacation. Whether hanging up the phone on a potential customer because he "was just not into that conversation" or contentedly chomping on a sandwich in the midst of all the ectoplasmic mayhem, Hemsworth brings a wonderful goofiness to the mix.
Though the film is allegedly set in present times, its heart is very much in the Seventies and Eighties, from its choice of music (DeBarge!) to some of its call-outs (The Exorcist, The Shining, Poltergeist). Never is this more evident than in its treatment of its special effects, which are both vibrantly updated and yet sweetly old-fashioned, and its vision of New York's Times Square with its straight-out-of-the-Eighties revival houses and non-extant companies cleaned up and neonised. Ghostbusters is not without its flaws - the designated villain responsible for the sudden increase of paranormal activity around the city is a bit standard, and one original Ghostbuster outstays his welcome - but it is a terrifically entertaining film that will induce both belly laughs and shivers down the spine. Forget the trailer, forget the social media chatter, go see it for yourself.
Ghostbusters Directed by: Paul Feig
Written by: Katie Dippold, Paul Feig; based on the 1984 film Ghostbusters written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis
Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, Chris Hemsworth, Charles Dance, Andy Garcia, Cecily Strong, Neil Casey, Matt Walsh, Michael Kenneth Williams, Steve Higgins, Zach Woods, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Ernie Hudson, Ed Begley Jr., Nate Corddry, Michael McDonald
