Ghostbusters

SPOILER-FREE MOVIE REVIEW

"If there's something strange in your neighbourhood, who ya gonna call?"

Not them, that's for sure.

Now before the major feminists and whatever-ists begin blasting me for being sexist, I would like to make a disclaimer.

I am not sexist. I respect women for who they are, and I firmly believe in gender equality. I support the fight for equal rights and I promise that I did not view this movie already hating these four women.

I went into this movie with an open mind despite the horrible backlash this film has received WAY before it was even released.

And so, here I am telling you that I am no sexist, and I watched this movie with the pure intention of giving it a chance.

Now, without further ado, let's talk about Ghostbusters.

This movie was doomed right from the first mention of a potential reboot of the 80's classic.

Personally, I am not a MAJOR fan of the original, but I did enjoy it very much and I consider it quality entertainment.

Despite the sequel being rather underwhelming, the two original films were both thoroughly enjoyable and both will eternally remain as classics.

Was a reboot 30 years after the world and the actors were done with catching ghosts all that necessary? Is there still demand for it?

Whatever the producers were thinking, I'll just take it as it is.

What this "new" Ghostbusters movie is is basically a modern re-telling of the original movie.

I'm serious, it's pretty darn blatant.

Right from the off, you can't help but get a sense that they're basically stealing plot points directly from a movie people loved in 1984 and still love today. There's no escaping the label of this reboot being something like a ripoff.

Sure, there are some new elements which are welcome and interesting, but that's not enough to cover it up.

You also get pretty much the same characters as in the original, only this time with different names and gender.

There's Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) who's just like Egon (Harold Ramis), Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) who's Venkman (Bill Murray), Jill Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) who's Ray (Dan Aykroyd), and Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) who's Winston (Ernie Hudson). It's so unimaginative.

Characters aside, I do quite like the chemistry between the four leads.

I especially liked Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon, with the former being one of my most sought-after comedic actresses and the latter, although quirky and odd at times, being a breath of fresh air with her mad antics.

As for the other two, well, they were pretty generic although they can turn completely outrageous at any instant.

I felt that Leslie Jones' character was just like the stereotypical "black person" in a Hollywood movie, and the fact that they gave her character a minimum wage job didn't help her cause either.

As for Melissa McCarthy, well... Sigh.

I've never really liked Melissa McCarthy. I always thought she was so incredibly unfunny.

The only time I found a performance by her bearable was in last year's Spy - also directed by Paul Feig.

In this movie, she's sort of a mixed bag. Most of the time she's bearable but there are moments where she slips into Melissa McCarthy mode and cracks a joke that falls flat on its face.

Ultimately, I still think that she's just appearing in too many mainstream movies and I'm getting sick of her brand of humour.

Along with these odd characters, there's also the manner in which this film portrays men as a gender.

This is just my personal opinion, but I felt that this movie tried to make too extreme a statement for female empowerment.

And I thought feminism was a good thing in that it seeks to achieve gender equality. In this movie though, the "feminism" felt so extreme that it even made the male characters so damn stupid and cardboard.

I feel that it was meant to be a role-reversal, wherein female actors always play damsels in distress or ditzy bimbos. This time, the women are so empowered and the men are so stupid. It's almost insulting.

Just look at Chris Hemsworth's character damn it. He's just a male "dumb blonde". It's so bad, and how could the mighty Thor take up such a poor role?

Worst part is that this movie was directed by a man in Paul Feig. Shame on him for portraying men in such negative light.

There are a number of cameos in this movie too (do keep a sharp eye out for them) - I won't specify who these people are, but the manner in which they appeared was so weird.

I felt that the cameos were so forced and unnatural that they came off as weird rather than nostalgic. They were shoe-horned into a shoe which was three sizes too small.

The movie also seems to have been edited by an ape.

I'm serious, I have not seen such poor editing in a big-budget Hollywood movie in a long time.

Scenes are either dragged on for too long or cut way too early, and it makes for one hell of a choppy movie which was horribly paced.

There's also not enough action in the film, and with such poor editing, it makes the movie feel so much longer than its two hour runtime.

The music is unimaginative and at times, bloody awful - especially that cancerous cover of the original Ghostbusters theme by Fall Out Boy (of all people) called Ghostbusters (I'm Not Afraid). I literally cringed harder than any other scene in the movie when that awful song came on.

The fact that this movie is a reboot doesn't help its cause either. I hated how they didn't even acknowledge the original film albeit for the forced cameos and a handful of easter eggs.

I think it's downright offensive that this is a completely new universe, meaning that it totally erases the relevance of the 1984 film and its 1989 sequel completely.

I have a theory on that point - the original director and writer/producer Ivan Reitman and Dan Aykroyd were probably paid a shit tonne of money for their names to be listed in producer roles for the sole purpose of appealing to die-hard fans of the original movies.

I say this because both men never intended to make a sequel to the original 1984 Ghostbusters movie in the first place, only doing so when Columbia Pictures convinced them to do a sequel due to the original's popularity.

Hence, why would those two want to come back now, 30 years later to revisit something that has been dead and buried for so long, and which has garnered such a cult following and built a lasting legacy? It all doesn't make sense to me.

Are there any other good points than those I mentioned earlier? Well, the special effects are decent enough.

However, saying that this movie's special effects is a vast improvement over the original's is like saying Andrew Garfield was a better Spider-Man than Tobey Maguire. You just can't beat the original.

It is a totally invalid argument to say that the special effects in the reboot is an improvement over the original

All in all, Ghostbusters, although not eye-rippingly awful, wasn't any good either.

Although the all-female team try their best to make this movie theirs, it just doesn't work with the weight of the classic pressing down on their shoulders.

You don't get that charm and wittiness of the original four, and nobody charismatic enough to do something so hilarious as when Bill Murray hopped on one foot like a total clown across a crowded town square just to get Dana (Sigourney Weaver)'s attention in the original film.

Ghostbusters is pretty much that classic case in which one shouldn't fix what isn't broken. In this case, why did they find a need to reboot a classic film franchise?

A sad waste of a talented cast. Rick Moranis was smart not to return to make a cameo.

To quote him, "It just makes no sense to me".

3/10.