Review of Ghostbusters (2016) by Garrett W — 08 Aug 2017

It's such a wasted effort that I feel I shouldn't waste much effort in reviewing it. As I was watching it in the theater I remember experiencing this feeling of "wait a minute, I saw this before..." multiple times. If the studio didn't want to bother setting this film apart from what came before it then why did they bother? It's fine to have some shout-outs to the classics but not the way they did it here. The cameos were...questionable at best, mired by the fact that Harold Ramis died a few years ago and thus he couldn't make a cameo as well.

Oh and the ghosts are lame. They're either in bright green (for the most part) or in bright blue, and they have nothing on what Stan Winston and the other FX geniuses behind the original movies conceived of. Slimer returns but it's just par for the course.

The leads aren't poor actresses because just like the original cast, they are all from SNL, or at least were alumni in some cases. They acted as well as you'd expect but it was the script that didn't help. Kristen Wiig didn't have any good lines or delivery, McCarthy unfortunately couldn't even come close to Dan Aykroyd's performance, and while there's nothing necessarily wrong with the other two leads, they certainly couldn't save this movie from it's unenviable status as a "meh" fest. Chris Hemsworth's character might rile a few chuckles but his character's goofy stupidity gets a bit overbearing. The villain is sleep inducing but I'll hand them this, at least he was not recycled from previous entries in the franchise (here's looking at you, official videogame).

The theme song they came up with for the movie was one of the worst aspects of the film.

The pre-release marketing was a disaster due to weak responses to weak naysayers, who should have been ignored as they deserved but instead Feig, in particular, declared that it was all due to the cast being all-female. I could personally care less if the cast were all male or all female, it's all about the chemistry between them. But instead he gave the 'critics' more ammunition to use against the movie. On the bright side, at least the Ghostbusters themselves weren't re-imagined as highly-attractive fish-out-of-water type bimbos who happened to wield experimental weaponry that can incapacitate ghosts and whatnot.

The special effects did not save this movie. None of the ghosts were even remotely intriguing in design and they were more like neon signs than what they were MEANT to be.

The jokes kind of fell flat but there was the odd moment where the comedy worked. I thought that Leslie Jones' character would be the most obnoxious but she's quite the opposite, actually, because her character somehow goes through the most changes.

I put too much effort into this movie with this review.