Review of Ghostbusters: The Best of Slimes

My wife and I also have a video review of Ghostbusters. You can check it out here.

Let's talk Ghostbusters, a movie that ranks right alongside The Princess Bride in terms of quotability. The original film is an eighties icon, and I was certainly at the age (11 to be exact) where the theatrical release of it created a beautiful wave in my pop culture ocean and I got to surf that all the way back to shore (along with Pac-Man and Fraggle Rock).

For a few years I was all about the Ghostbusters. The premise worked all around. These weren't just characters in a nerd-movie, these were metaphors for the full extent of a nerd's personality (particularly in an age where nerds were still in danger of being beaten up on principle). Rick Moranis's Louis Tully was how I thought the world viewed me. Dan Aykroyd's Ray Stantz was the part of me that still believed in magic. Harold Ramis's Egon Spengler was my 'how does everything work' side taken to a heroic level. Bill Murray's Peter Venkman was my blossoming cynicism in a mutual challenge with the surrounding world's growing complexity. And Ernie Hudson's Winston Zeddemore (where the hell did they get these names?) was my voice of reason being called upon to shine under extraordinary circumstances.

Admittedly it was an all boys club. Annie Potts managed to cement her sassy secretary Janine Melnitz into the vernacular with only a few precious scenes, but it's ultimately Sigourney Weaver's Dana Barrett that provides any kind of female presence to the film. If you were my age, this was your introduction to Weaver (Alien wasn't a movie for an 11 year old). It's a fascinating casting choice in retrospect. On paper, Dana is your basic damsel in distress for Murray-o to rescue from Bowser the Bowserian (wow, I'm entirely too delighted by that sentence). In fact, if the studio had cast a generically Hollywood type actress in the role, you'd half expect her to squeal "Save me!" like Dragon's Lair's Princess Daphne. But Weaver is one of those performers who radiates strength.

Take the moment where she tells Peter that he makes her think of a game show host. It's a bizarre line, but Weaver sells it with such a Maggie Smith level of contempt that we feel Peter's hurt feelings. Hell, Bill Murray doesn't even have to do a damn thing in the scene, she's acting his emotions for him; she's that good. Dana looks like she could bite your face off before she gets possessed by Zuul, and when the ghosts get her, it honestly feels like the stakes have been raised.

So, yeah, Ghostbusters is awesome all around. Even the dated effects are just a time capsule of where visual magic has been. And everything from the proton packs to the Ecto-mobile are so memorable that the Universal theme parks were sending out the Ghostbusters well past the point of obscurity (pitting them against Beetlejuice at one point, which was a movie that desperately needed to happen).

With that much goodwill working in its favor, what the Wally Wick happened to the sequel? Well, a couple of things. One, Ghostbusters II was honestly unneeded. The studio wanted it, because a movie studio's goal is to make money not maintain dignity; and that's not a criticism, it's a simple reality. But the original movie felt like a complete story, and nobody in my circle was even asking for a continuation.

Secondly, there was the cartoon, which was for an age slightly younger than me. I didn't watch The Real Ghostbusters starring Arsenio Hall, but a lot of people did. And the sequel was for that audience, i.e. a kid's movie. Again, I understand the studio's line of thinking, but the result was along the lines of Superman III. It's smart to try to reach new demographics but it's usually not a good idea to piss off your core audience in the process.

Then there's Murray phoning it in, and Aykroyd and Ramis's script that seems to require excessive 'pushing it out of the mud', as opposed to the smooth ride of the original. It's not to say that there's nothing good about the movie. The courtroom scene is pretty memorable. And as riveting as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was, I happen to find the Statue of Liberty stroll through New York just a little cooler. But overall it contracts a severe case of sequelitis, it feels stale.

As it's been pointed out by someone more anonymous than me, the problem with a sequel is that a story typically conveys the single most important event in a character's life (or in this case, a unit of characters). Once that story is told, anything else is going to pale in comparison. Sure, there are examples of episodic stories like James Bond or Sherlock Holmes, but we're more interested in what those characters do than who they are. Ghostbusters is like a Marx Brothers movie. In every Marx Brothers movie, we start with a blank slate and each Brother has his own unique backstory, and by the end of it they've collectively become the Marx Brothers. You don't really care what happens to them after that final joke.

Now would it have been possible to do a more respectable sequel? Maybe. The notion of the Ghostbusters no longer being needed is an intriguing idea. What else are they qualified to do? It's not all that epic, but it's got some merit. There's also the issue of a perfectly reassembled cast. Why is Louis Tully back? Why is Dana being targeted a second time? Boy, that would have been an easy one to answer if this weren't a kid's movie. Dana and Louis had sex while they were both possessed in the first film. And you could ditch this whole Vigo the Carpathian crap.

But the main thing that needs to happen in a sequel is shining the spotlight on the secondary characters, in this case Winston and/or Janine. What if there's an effect in being around supernatural elements for a prolonged period that may not show up if you've spent years priming yourself to them (like the founding scientists) but start to manifest if you're a relative newcomer to the project (like the hired help)? That would have been a sequel hook that doesn't just rehash the original beats.

So that brings us to the infamous reboot that everyone decided months ago they were going to hate. I confess I was disinterested in seeing it, mainly because Dan Aykroyd had been insisting for over a decade that Ghostbusters III was happening and my response was always "Why?". Murray made it clear he was as on board with it as Sony was with The Amazing Spiderman 3, and of course Ramis moved on in the most extreme manner, so the follow-up entry to a sequel that nobody wanted was dead and buried and the epitaph read "Were we seriously still talking about this?"

But Hollywood is a persistent bastard, and it lives by the "bad press is good press" motto. Hence the announcement of the all-female cast reboot just daring everyone from purists to chauvinists to buy a ticket so they can have something to rant about. And the early complaints are pretty easy to compile into three categories, as follows.

One, it's the exact same characters just gender swapped. No it isn't. There's not the Winston and there's not the Venkman and there's not the Janine of this movie so much as there's just a fairly symmetric roll call quantity. In fact, one of the things that stands out about the reboot is just how different of a flavor the core cast gives off. The original characters were iconic, but did you ever notice that they didn't have much depth? They certainly didn't need it, just like the Marx Brothers weren't multidimensional characters, they were just a force of nature. The ladies here have layers and backstories, some only hinted at but they're designed for a longer haul than their male counterparts ever were, and it was a smart move.

Two, the special effects are bad. No they aren't. They're Ghostbusters effects. They're meant to be colorful, and soft, and round. You're supposed to simultaneously feel like you want to burn the ghosts and cuddle with them, and the movie gives you that. There's a really nice sequence towards the end where the movie doles out the action figures en masse, subtly pointing out how easy the boys of the eighties really had it.

Three, the movie isn't as funny as the original. Well, no shit, because nothing is going to be as funny as the film that gave us the lines "What about the Twinkie?" and "When someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!". Fortunately the reboot doesn't try to top the original on this point, or even match it. Instead, it goes for a more coherent story line (that doesn't tack on Gozer in the third act) and finds the humorous beats where they work. The movie does have many laugh out loud moments, several small chuckle moments, quite a few smile to yourself bits, and ultimately nothing that straight out falls flat (except for a couple of early lowbrow shots). That's a pretty damn good batting average for a comedy.

The movie may have one of the strongest ensemble casts in recent memory. Pick a performer from any scene (Zach Woods, Karan Soni, Michael McDonald, Cecily Strong), you're only scratching the surface of what they have to offer future projects. In particular, be on the lookout for more of newcomer Neil Casey, who bears more than a passing resemblance to a young John Belushi. His villainous Rowan North is dynamic enough that your mind inserts the actor into scenes where the character was being played by Chris Hemsworth or the Ghostbusters logo.

But really the important thing is the core cast, and I'm happy to say they work really well together. It may not be the strongest chemistry, at least at this point, but it's there. And assuming Sony really does have their sights set on a trilogy, this is a positive aspect. The original team came together and peaked in the first film, which is why they really had nowhere to go after that. The ladies of this film are in the early stages of team development, and all signs point to things getting even better. Chris Hemsworth plays an out of work actor who never really seems to know what situation he's in, and as such he gets the bulk of the scripted jokes. It's an excellent counter-use of the guy who convinced us he was Thor.

The movie struggles a bit with Leslie Jones's Patty Tolan, but fortunately she manages to claim enough of the spotlight to be more than just the fourth Ghostbuster. Her rationale for joining the team is clear and human; she's a warm person who desperately wants to be part of something bigger than her. Patty befriends the other women almost instantly with an impressive selflessness. For her crowning moment of awesome, watch her hanging on to Kate McKinnon's Jill Holtzmann with one hand while fending off an attack from a possessed Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), and winning.

The heart of the story is the friendship between Abby and Erin, (Kristen Wiig), who bonded as kids over ghosts but had a painful separation over real life. The supernatural reunites them, and the emotions underlying their characters are prevalent without ever taking over the story. That's a hard balance to strike, but the actresses and director Paul Feig clearly know what they're doing.

But Kate McKinnon is the breakout performer. She's electrifying on screen in every shot she's in. Unlike McCarthy and Wiig who have already proven themselves capable of handling film presence and acting, McKinnon is right on that cusp of "where do I go after Saturday Night Live?" It's fascinating to watch her test the water, and while the script never requires her to go outside of her actress's comfort zone it does give her ample opportunity to just play with nuance on a large scale. I expect we're going to see a lot of wonderful things from her.

In the end, Ghostbusters 2016 is about supportiveness. There's things about the world that suck, but our greatest asset is each other, combined with trust and hope. The movie is a hell of a lot better than the naysayers are preemptively claiming it is, and I'm totally behind the franchise. If it winds up falling apart now it won't be because of the studio, the cast or the director. It will be because of the audience simply refusing to say yes.