Ghostbusters

A worthless, thoroughly tedious remake, Ghostbusters follows Kristen Wiig’s Erin Gilbert, Melissa McCarthy’s Abby Yates, Kate McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzmann, and Leslie Jones’ Patty Tolan as they band together to stop an otherworldly threat triggered by Neil Casey’s mysterious Rowan North. Ghostbusters, before it devolves into an interminable cinematic experience, opens with a fair degree of promise, with the movie’s amusing pre-credits sequence, detailing a tour guide’s (Zach Woods) ghostly encounter, setting the stage for what could (and should) have been a fun adventure flick. Filmmaker Paul Feig, however, slowly-but-surely drains the viewer’s interest and enthusiasm by emphasizing bland characters and a momentum-free narrative, with the movie’s roster of talented performers, consequently and for the most part, forced to overact their way through one hopelessly hackneyed sequence after another (eg a seemingly endless series of scenes in which the title characters try out new gizmos and weapons). It’s clear, too, that the film’s progressively unwatchable atmosphere is exacerbated by an almost total lack of laughs, while Feig’s continued reliance on less-than-subtle instances of computer-generated special effects grows more and more infuriating as time progresses – to the extent that the entirety of the movie’s third act comes off as a nonsensical jumble of colorful images. The pervasively misguided vibe renders Ghostbusters‘ few positive attributes moot, and it is, in the end, difficult to recall a more irrelevant and unforgivably horrendous contemporary remake.

* out of ****