Review of Ghostbusters (2016) by Robert W — 19 Dec 2018

The opening is good & sets the tone nicely, but it's as if a completely different director made the rest of the movie!! It loses all scariness & goes for the fart & slapstick jokes that you see in the trailers.

The 4 female leads were fine, especially McCarthy & McKinnon (yet she was a bit too random & over-the-top), but they never really felt like a team - more like they were just waiting their turn for the next joke delivery. The whole film felt very cartoonish & unrealistic.

Apart from the scene showing the destructive power of the proton packs, in all later scenes the proton streams had no weight & they had no trouble aiming those wandering streams over other ghostbusters' heads - no fear of their consequences.

Editing was weird - characters all of a sudden having snacks in their hands or being on a phone call; slamming the same ghost around 3 times from different angles - & proton packs kill ghosts now??? The rumoured "song & dance routine" that was in the leaked script & E-mails has been edited out, but it leaves a weird set-up that goes nowhere. Just a lot of police & military personnel standing pointing.

The development of their ghostbusting technology was bizarre & unrealistic - they seemed to invent & develop a whole range of unrelated equipment (gloves to punch ghosts??!! A wood chipper ghost-killer machine???!!) over the space of a couple of days!!

The script had glimmers of potential in places, but was mostly bad. Most of the jokes fell flat & the 9 people in the theatre with me barely chuckled throughout the entire movie. The ending was terrible and very anti-climactic.

While nice to see ghostbusters back on the big screen, this movie was a very scooby-doo, cartoony movie that really wasn't that funny. Not a terrible movie, but nowhere near as good as it could have been. It's the type of movie that is on TV on a Saturday morning during school holidays.