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Ghostbusters
STARRING: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones
DIRECTOR: Paul Feig
Genre: Sci-Fi/Comedy
Rating: PG-15
116 mins
I think I’m in something of a temporal crisis. The world is obsessed with Pokémon, Blink-182 are top of the charts, and Ghostbusters is out at the cinema. What decade am I in? Who am I gonna call? Dr Who?
Unless the interior of the GulfWeekly office has been secretly transformed into a TARDIS, I’m actually in July, 2016. It’s funny how things work.
What isn’t funny, and what doesn’t work, is this reboot of what was beforehand an untarnished slice of cinematic genius. This is a horror from start to finish … a horror show that is.
There’s a lot of negativity stacked against the film, it must be said. The first trailer is the most ‘disliked’ film trailer of all time on YouTube, with almost a million compared to 200,000 ‘likes’. In fact, it’s the ninth-most disliked video on the entire site behind an assortment of music videos.
The reasons for this are numerous. One of them undoubtedly is the decision to replace the four men from the original with four women. The subsequent backlash was dubbed misogynistic by some, whilst others claimed it was general anger at the perceived ‘forced agenda’ being encouraged by Hollywood.
Unfortunately, the all-female cast is the least of the film’s worries. The fact that the script is diabolical and the jokes have the accuracy of Stormtroopers with cataracts are more troublesome.
It seems the best stuff was actually in the trailer … and the reaction should tell you all you need to know about that.
The movie largely follows the structure of Ivan Reitman’s first film. Abby Yates (Wiig) and Erin Gilbert (McCarthy) are former friends and paranormal investigators who are brought back together after a rift in their friendship when, with Erin’s new nuclear engineer pal Jillian Holtzman (McKinnon), they encounter their first ghost.
As more and more malevolent entities start popping up in New York, they perfect their equipment and gain a new ally Patty Tolan (Jones) and discover someone is trying to summon ghosts to bring about a paranormal apocalypse.
It’s hard to walk into a film and ignore the negative furore surrounding it, but I tried. I left myself open to having my mind changed that this was a good idea, but I just wished I’d spent it watching the brilliant original for the 10th time.
Not even nostalgia can save this one. There are throwbacks and cameos, of course, but they feel superficial and thrown in as an attempt to rescue this mess rather than to enhance the action. It’s blatantly obvious that the writers couldn’t decide whether they wanted this to be a completely new take on the franchise or a loving homage to the original, and because of that it’s trapped between the two.
Even the visuals don’t help to answer that question. The special effects are so mediocre that I actually wondered if they were a deliberate nod to the relatively crude effects of 1984, and not just dreadful. The ghosts aren’t realistic, frightening, funny, or fleshed out with any narrative backing at all; they’re just hissing, hateful, murderous creatures storming through the city waiting to be busted by the wacky foursome.
The female cast seem to be loving their roles, but the script is so dull that their shtick grates after a while. There are only so many times you can watch the group scrutinise their surroundings to make a plan and then rush through the streets screeching and hollering their heads off before you just wish they’d drown in Slimer’s entrails.
There are so few redeeming features in this movie that my only wish when I walked out was that I could still re-watch the original and not have anything about this one creep into my mind. It’ll be a tough job, as this ghoul will be haunting my nightmares for months.
Showing in: Novo Cinemas, Cineco, Seef II, Saar, Wadi Al Sail, Al Jazira, Dana Cineplex
Rating: 1/5
