Yep they just had to do it. The Hollywood trend of rebooting much beloved franchises hits us yet again. I have kept away from reading too much about movie plots and trailers or discussion videos of upcoming and anticipated movies because with the stuff that is out there, it tends to ruin movie watching experiences for me. So other than the fact that the new Ghostbusters movie features and all women cast of the busters plus Chris Hemsworth and that there were cameos by the 4 main cast members of the first two movies (minus the late Harold Ramis) I knew nothing much about it. I had seen one of the trailers a couple of times but that’s about it.
The 2016 American supernatural action comedy film directed by Paul Feig & written by Feig and Katie Dippold, stars Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones and Hemsworth. I missed watching this movie in the theatres as it went quickly from the theatres near me and I couldn’t get to the one that’s 45 minutes away in time. Anyways, I got a copy to watch it this afternoon. Slightly surprised as I did not know it was a reboot; I had thought it was (or hoped) going to be set nearly 30 years after the events of the 1989 sequel and have the ladies be the heir-apparents of the original gang. Think about it – 27 years later the old guard trains or finds a group of ladies doing the same ghostbusting that they had originally done all those years ago! I think that was an opportunity missed. You could have had done that instead of just cameos by Murray, Aykroyd, Hudson & Weaver.
While the movie does have it’s fun elements and the cast is pretty good, it does have a few flaws. Sometimes I think the humour was forced quite a bit and it doesn’t flow naturally like the original movie does. Adding Hemsworth in this film too made it hard for me to appreciate it. I like him in Thor but he isn’t the comedic talent needed here. Maybe he didn’t need to be but I found him miscast here. Leslie Jones – I found her funny and she’s probably quite a charmer but this loud African-American shouting for comedy is something that gets on my nerves (I felt the same about a really funny movie with Kevin Hart; even if he is funny the shouting pissed me off). Though I find Kate McKinnon funny in other stuff and hot in real life, she just didn’t do much for me in this film, with the exception of a couple of scenes. Kristen Wiig (oh how I love her) and Melissa McCarthy were good but not on the level that I was expecting. And I almost didn’t recognize Andy Garcia! Though Cecily Strong as Jennifer Lynch, the mayor’s assistant was quite fun.
The special effects harkens back to the original movies and it was cool to see Slimer and his better half. Everything else was just about ok and fun in an unmemorable way. The villain played by Neil Casey was more like a caricature than anything and I guess it kinda fell flat. I did enjoy the film but found myself comparing it to the original and it was no contest. This is tough as I so wanted the movie to succeed and was rooting for the ladies. I hated the dislike the film got before the film was released based on some of the comments about an all ladies group of Busters. C’mon! I will give the film a 7 outta 10!