Ghostbusters, film review: Who you gonna call? Not them

The much-dreaded Ghostbusters reboot is pretty crass but perhaps the original movie is not as good as we remember, says David Sexton
David Sexton15 July 2016

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. It’s worse. One of the consequences of the dominance of pop culture is that so many people now become fixated on what first mattered to them as kids or teenagers, blocked from moving on, even if the film or music was never truly exceptional — let alone in any proper sense of the term classic, an achievement to grow towards, standing beyond its time and origin.

It’s why when a figure such as David Bowie dies there’s such an outpouring of reminiscence of what he and his songs meant to his fans at a particular time in their lives, rather than more detached evaluation. It’s why the sense that quite different films or music might be appropriate for adults and teenagers has pretty much gone.

It’s why, when this Ghostbusters project, making a new film with a core female cast, was merely announced two years ago, there was an immediate outpouring on social media of indignation, even rage, from fans of the original — and when the first trailer when up on YouTube it quickly became the most negatively received ever (900,000 dislikes!). Since the film’s release, the trolleying, as Eddie calls it in AbFab, has carried on apace, with thousands of one-star ratings posted.

Tempting as it is to think this response was simply an outburst of repellent misogyny, refusing to allow women to replace men in these iconic roles, it is surely just as much a refusal to have a treasured part of one’s own growing up altered retrospectively, this being taken as a personal affront, if not a form of historic child abuse.

In fact, the new Ghostbusters is not bad at all and it would make a fun outing for a 12-year-old. To be sure, it’s far from great, pretty crass actually, and markedly less funny than the director Paul Feig’s other female-centred comedies, such as Spy and The Heat and, above all, Bridesmaids. But then the original Ghostbusters of 1984 is not all it’s cracked up to be, nostalgically, either. Would it ever have lodged itself so firmly in popular consciousness without such a cheerleading song and killer catchphrase (“Who you gonna call”)?

I watched the original again on Saturday before seeing the new film on Sunday, and was startled by how disappointing it seemed in comparison to memory and reputation. Bill Murray, so adored in this role by fans, seemed an over-confident sex pest, not a charmer, while even Sigourney Weaver didn’t have much to contribute.

Admittedly, the very idea of confronting such a traditional threat as ghosts with cranky new tech in the form of proton packs was an absolute brainwave then, a brilliant extension of the daft activities of the Society for Psychical Research, which has so hopelessly persisted since its foundation in 1882. Now it’s a familiar trope.

It’s good the way no attempt is made to explain why the ghostbusters this time are women. They just are. Kristen Wiig is Erin Gilbert, a physicist hoping to get tenure at her university, when a book she co-wrote about ghosts ages ago with her friend Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) resurfaces on Amazon, blowing her chances of academic respectability. Furiously, she goes to complain to Abby, only to be told: “That book was our baby and you abandoned our baby.” Wiig, so slinky and so nearly but not quite normal, and McCarthy, so direct and truculent, as well as being everyman-ish in being one of the few Hollywood stars close to normal American body size, work really well together, as so often before.

Abby introduces her technical assistant, weirdo brainiac Jillian Holtzmann, who keeps coming up with wizard new devices, played by the Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon in her first film role. Some have been delighted by her performance. I thought her the weakest link, her acting consisting of little more than ludicrous gurning. Jeff Goldblum she is not. But then I am not an SNL addict.

Having a blast: Abby (Melissa McCarthy), Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon), Erin (Kristen Wiig) and Patty (Leslie Jones)

Together they go off to investigate a sighting of a ghost in an historic house — and the ghoul conclusively appears, sliming Erin comprehensively, “in every crack,” she bitterly complains. So now they’re in the ghostbusting business, big-time.

They are joined by Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones, also from SNL), a subway worker who encounters a ghost in a tunnel and comes to offer her services, which include excellent knowledge of the city’s history and the provision of a vehicle — her uncle’s hearse, an early Eighties Cadillac, which the team fit out as “Ecto-1” all over again.

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Truth to tell, the whole film is pretty much Ghostbusters all over again with added whomp. Although the scriptwriters Feig and Katie Dippold have mostly dropped the Sumerian gods stuff from the original, they have hugely upped the scale of the rampant ghouls (there are moments when it looks like a Roland Emmerich alien invasion movie more than a schlocky comedy).

This time the chief villain is just a nerdy creep, Rowan (Neil Casey). Plenty of the original cast make cameo appearances, from Dan Aykroyd as a taxi-driver to Bill Murray as Dr Martin Heiss, now a supernatural debunker so conceited and annoying that the ghostbusters are provoked into releasing one of the spirits they’ve captured, just to show him. It ain’t a good idea.

As for totty, there’s Chris Hemsworth as the Ghostbusters’ fabulously dim receptionist Kevin, so stupid he can’t usefully answer the telephone or make coffee but immediately given the job because he is lusted after by the women. This is an old joke, reversed, and of course as a man I am hugely offended by it, red in the face, gasping for air. Hemsworth, previously almost always a superhero, is actually surprisingly funny, with slick timing and convincingly good-natured imbecility.

There has been criticism that Leslie Jones’s part as the sassy streetwise Patty is actually a retreat into African-American caricature from the role of Winston Zeddemore, played by Ernie Hudson, in the original films. However, funny is funny and she’s a force of nature.

For me the best single line in the whole film came when the ghostbusters pursue a demon into a heavy metal concert, the fiend being initially taken as part of the act (presumably scripted pre-Bataclan, this), and try crowd-surfing to get at it. However, nobody at all catches Patty and she hits the floor hard. After taking a moment, she says angrily: “OK, I don’t know if that was a race thing or a lady thing, but I am mad as hell.”

But then perhaps there aren’t enough pratfalls — and what makes Ghostbusters altogether, old and new, a bit of a specialised taste and such a contested zone is that it is so cheerleading, so deliberately a group booster? If you want to join in, though, this Ghostbusters would be a perfectly satisfactory place to start, if not a perfect continuation for diehards still haunted by the past.

Cert 12A, 105 mins

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