Ghostbusters (12A)
Three stars
Dir: Paul Feig
With: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Charles Dance
Runtime: 116 minutes
WAS there ever a film so haunted by an original than Ghostbusters? From the time a reboot was announced, with an all-female cast of spectre hunters – pause here for Munchian scream at the feminist cheek of it – anyone would think Hollywood was planning to remake Citizen Kane with sock puppets.
In reality, apart from a cracking, Oscar-nominated song, the 1984 comedy directed by Ivan Reitman and starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Sigourney Weaver had its flaws, among them a third act that lasted almost as long as some have been waiting for the Second Coming. If it wasn’t for the song, and the “Who you gonna call?” hook-line, the first Ghostbusters (hands up who even remembers the 1989 sequel?) might have been just another enjoyable enough comedy, fondly remembered but nothing groundbreaking.
Paul Feig’s 2016 version hits the same mark. It has some ace lines, and some cracking performances, but it is also irritatingly baggy, unfocused, and has a character so annoying I would rather wake to Nosferatu than willingly submit to five more minutes in her company.
The picture starts promisingly with a tour guide telling visitors about a haunted house from olden times that included a room where “PT Barnum first had the idea to enslave elephants”. Feig, the director of Bridesmaids and The Heat, here writing as well as directing, always gives good snark. You can tell some of the lines have been polished till they gleam.
The tour does not end well, leaving the curator to seek the services of Erin, a physicist played by Kristen Wiig. Once a believer in ghosts, now a respectable academic trying for tenure, Erin does not want the gig. But fate hurls her together with her old ghost-hunting partner Abby (Melissa McCarthy), who has never lost her faith in an afterlife. These two are joined by Patty (Leslie Jones), a subway worker looking for a new challenge, and Holtzmann, a wacky inventor type (played by Kate McKinnon). How wacky is this character? Phenomenally. She’s the team equivalent of the Fast Show’s Colin Hunt, the office joker complete with silly specs and non-stop girning. Some have found her one of the best things about the film – make your own mind up.
There are, predictably enough, nods to the first film. One or two work, others are clunkers it might have been best to leave on the drawing board.
Far more successful than the cameos or the cliched inventor character is Leslie Jones, a comic actor I would definitely want to see again. She could carry a film on her own. Wiig and McCarthy already do that, of course. Both graduates of Bridesmaids, they spark off each other like the old pros they are. Also worth mentioning in dispatches is Chris Hemsworth, playing a nice but dim receptionist who could have come straight out of a Diet Coke advert. When it comes to eye candy in Ghostbusters, Hemsworth is it. Another winning touch of role reversal there from Feig.
The technical stuff, the conjuring up of ghosts, ghouls and ectoplasm, is impressive, reflecting the decades that have passed in special effects since the first film, but what we have come for is the comedy, and this Ghostbusters is not quite enough of a blast compared to say, McCarthy and Feig’s special agent spoof Spy, or Wiig’s weird but wonderful bleak comedy Welcome to Me. A few great lines – and when they are good they are very good – do not a 116-minute comedy make. Not even the practised sparring of Wiig and McCarthy can disguise a shortage of jokes in the script. Riffs go on too long, scenes are over-extended, and gags stretched thin. And yes, perhaps in some misguided homage to that first film, the finale goes on forever and a day.
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