“Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker Jr. is one of the best movie songs of all time. It’s one of those tunes that can’t escape your head in a good way once you’ve heard it, it’s so fun and charming and eminently likable. Usually, it doesn’t fail to put me in a good mood. But when it came at the end of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the most recent attempt to reboot that 80s comedy franchise, I felt nothing. For the first time, it rang hollow to me –just another I.P. hallmark cynically regurgitated and made meaningless.
As a movie franchise, Ghostbusters probably shouldn’t exist. That original 1984 film was a fluke that never should have worked given all the very disparate elements it threw in a blender and paired with a script that was heavily improvised by its’ comedian cast. It ballooned into one of the biggest hits of that decade though, and a cultural phenomenon, largely off of kids, who the film had not been made for but was nonetheless embraced by in a blockbuster era. However, that movie was very much lightning in a bottle, and each attempt to recapture it has failed. The only half-decent Ghostbusters movie since the original is more famous for a ridiculously overblown backlash that arguably blew open the floodgates of toxic fandom. That won’t be the fate of Ghostbusters: Afterlife though, a movie which coddles the fans to an absurd degree –rather its’ legacy will merely be as a case study of Hollywood’s complacent unoriginality in the early 2020s.
A direct sequel that tries to disguise brand synergy as a loving tribute, Ghostbusters: Afterlife follows the grandchildren of the late Harold Ramis’ Egon Spengler, who passed away some time before the story began, having taken up in a shack outside a small town in Oklahoma in expectation of an apocalypse event. And yes, the film does make use of those same CGI tricks some recent Star Wars movies have to reanimate dead actors. It’s done in moderation here, but feels no less ghoulish. Carrie Coon plays his daughter moving into the old place due to financial difficulties, with Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace as the kids destined to inherit Egon’s mantle. To complete the foursome there’s also a love interest for the teenage boy and a new insufferable friend for the girl. Essentially, it’s Ghostbusters Babies directed by a Ghostbusters baby himself, Jason Reitman -whose father Ivan of course helmed the original.
And the film spends a sizeable chunk of its’ runtime dangling iconography from that original movie in front of its audience the way you might jingle keys for your dog. Every bit of Ghostbusters paraphernalia that shows up is treated with the utmost respect and reverence, even when there is no textual reason for it to be so adulated. From the gadgets Ray and Egon used to the proton packs to Ecto-1, all are introduced by the film as holy relics. The Ghostbusters themselves are imbued with a legacy warped by legend and mystique, as though they were glorious hero crusaders and not fringe scientists running an extermination company in Manhattan. It’s all been re-framed, Reitman contextualizing everything to do with the Ghostbusters brand as mythical –right down to an ersatz Force Awakens moment where Paul Rudd, playing a summer school teacher, tells the kids that ‘the stories were true’. You might forget how loose and self-effacing that original movie actually was.
This new degree of grandeur cannot be paired with a cheeky sensibility, and as such Ghostbusters: Afterlife takes itself incredibly seriously. It goes for jokes occasionally, though no more than your average family-friendly blockbuster –indeed this is the first Ghostbusters movie that primarily targets kids, yet it also requires these kids to be familiar with a near forty-year old movie that regularly makes sex and political jokes. And the humour is all pretty tame and in some places, condescendingly thin –feeling as far away from the sensibility of Ghostbusters as possible. For as hit and miss as that 2016 movie was, it was way closer in spirit than this middling attempt at yet another Stranger Things knock-off. Rarely is this movie fun or clever, or in any way irreverent or inventive in its script. On the contrary, it’s baffling how proudly derivative it is.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife really is for all intents and purposes, a J.J. Abrams Star Wars movie for the Ghostbusters franchise. It has no interest at all in anything new beyond a generic coming-of-age tone that saps out the humour as it recycles just about all of the features, plot points, and conflict from the latter part of the first movie. The Gatekeeper and the Keymaster? They’re back! The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man? Back as well! Gozer? You better believe it, and played by Olivia Wilde! Slimer’s not there, but he’s been replaced by an indistinguishable clone. The last act of this movie is like a re-enactment, right down to crossing the streams and “there is no _____, only Zuul!” Such lazy fan service is not confined purely to the climax though. Earlier in the movie were things like a recreation of the arms attacking someone from within a chair, a half-assed “who you gonna call?” reference, and a cameo by Annie Potts as Janine, established as a friend of Egons’, but with no explanation as to why she’s in this town (she never reappears afterwards). At one point, Grace’s Phoebe, a nerd stereotype and little more than a tiny female Egon, decides her one prison phone call will be to Ray Stanz –Dan Aykroyd never passing up the opportunity to reprise this role.
Of course at this point it’s well known that the movie is a Ghostbusters reunion, and when Aykroyd reappears later alongside Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson, it couldn’t be sadder. Especially given they’re made to spout dumb, awkward callbacks too, and the way that they factor into the climax is actually insulting considering the movie isn’t supposed to be about them. The old guard takes centre stage at the most important point for the movie, the new characters might as well just be plot devices.
Of course at this point it’s well known that the movie is a Ghostbusters reunion, and when Aykroyd reappears later alongside Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson, it couldn’t be sadder. Especially given they’re made to spout dumb, awkward callbacks too, and the way that they factor into the climax is actually insulting considering the movie isn’t supposed to be about them. The old guard takes centre stage at the most important point for the movie, the new characters might as well just be plot devices.
They aren’t though, but are sadly not anything to write home about. Wolfhard’s Trevor, little more than a dumb teenager, is extremely flat, as the film centres focus more directly on Phoebe; and to her credit, Grace gives it her all where Wolfhard seems to coast. But the character is written so poorly she never amounts to the heart of the movie she’s so clearly intended to be. She’s saddled with a one-note joke called Podcast (Logan Kim) –so named for the fact he has a podcast and is really into conspiracy theories –I hated this kid. Trevor’s crush Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) meanwhile, features very minimally for one of the new Ghostbusters being set up. For some reason Reitman saw fit to shove J.K. Simmons and Tracy Letts into nothing roles; the only characters that work are the other adults. Coon seems to belong in another movie, a sincere family drama, that for the first two acts gives her something to work with. And Rudd, though epitomizing the movies’ obsessive nostalgia to a degree, is too likeable a presence to be completely brought down by it.
If this weren’t the year that saw Space Jam: A New Legacy, I would call Ghostbusters: Afterlife 2021’s most pandering movie. Surely, it’s also among the most creatively bankrupt. If you take out all the references to the 1984 Ghostbusters, all the plot points cribbed from it, you have virtually nothing –and that’s by design. Reitman’s a decent filmmaker, his involvement with this movie is pure marketing gimmick: inheriting and continuing the legacy from his father, despite Ivan’s direction having little to do with why that movie worked in the first place. The whole enterprise is merely to prop up the Ghostbusters brand, to lazily capitalize on nostalgia for it without the least bit effort to move beyond, in the certainty that fans don’t want anything new. It succeeds on that level alone -I never want to see another Ghostbusters movie.
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