The Ghostbusters reboot has been lauded, criticized, praised and hated since the contract to make it was first signed several years ago. When the trailer was released, it was widely panned by fans who were horrified by it. Now it’s here and it’s a hit. We saw it on Sunday night, in VIP 3D no less!
The way some reviewers and Internet trolls behave, you’d think a reworking of the 1984 comedy was like tearing down and rebuilding a sacred cultural landmark. Redoing Ghostbusters with women in the lead roles wasn’t the sign of the apocalypse that some would have you believe. However, some guys who grew up with Ghostbusters as their favourite flick went a little loopy over the idea of a remake as if it would somehow actually affect their memories of the first film and ruin their childhoods.
Bottom line: It’s funny and silly like the first one. Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and SNL’s Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon are the ‘busters now. The story has shades of the original and pays homage to it. Stars of the first film make cameo appearances, except for Harold Ramis, who died in 2014, and Rick Moranis, who simply wasn’t interested. Sigourney Weaver, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Dan Aykroyd, Annie Potts – they’re all in there with varying lengths of screen time. There’s plenty of green goo – ahem, ectocplasm – goofy physical comedy as well as zinger one-liners. Aussie hearthrob Chris Hemsworth is ideal as the Ghostbusters’ bag-of-hammers-dumb receptionist. They went light on the 3D, thank goodness, so when an effect arrived, it was cool.
My only quibble is with an element of the climax that was meant to repair an old rift in the relationship between two of the women. I think the movie would have been better without it and it probably would have saved producers about a million dollars worth of special effects that looked cheesy and out of place compared to the rest of it. But no one else seemed to flinch at it like I did, and it probably accounted for less than two minutes of screen time. Throughout the movie, there are throwback-moments to the original, most of them subtle. If you go, wait until after the credits for another one tacked on the end. Although nothing has been officially announced, I fully expect this movie to spawn a sequel, just like the original did.