The Sunday Mail
I have already gone on record expressing my total disdain for reboots, remakes and unwarranted prequels that do nothing for the original products except ruin them. The attempt to turn “Rush Hour” into a series was a flop, nobody asked for the “MacGyver” remake and with the exception of maybe “The Magnificent Seven” and one or two other gems, everything Hollywood has retouched in the last decade has tanked.
Now you can add “Ghostbusters” to that list. I watched this film a month ago and had no intention of ever mentioning it in this column, but the piece on Indian cinema which I am working on is taking a bit longer than expected. While entertaining, Bollywood can be exhausting.
Back to Ghostbusters. The 2016 remake, starring an all-female cast, follows the trials of physicist Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wigg) who delves into investigating the paranormal after a book she wrote in her youth resurfaces on the Internet and sees her shunned by Columbia University’s scientific community.
She reconnects with former partner Abby Yates (Mellissa McCarthy) and employs goofball engineer Dr Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and a clerk, Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), and poof, the Ghostbusters are reborn. Their first mission, as they try to convince everyone that ghosts exist, is to stop embittered scientist Rowan North (Neil Casey) from unleashing a paranormal apocalypse on New York.
When I first heard of a redone “Ghostbusters” with an all-female lead I was excited. Feig was put in the director’s chair, and I am a fan, and McCarthy, Wiig and McKinnon all signed up for the project. And the cherry on top was endorsement of the project by the original film crew.
During and after production, the movie received a lot of flak from — mostly — men who took exception to making it an all-female affair. The sane world ignored the bigots. But the final product just does not cut it. The plot is simple enough and could have worked really well as an origin story had it not failed to grasp the gist of a “Ghostbuster” movie, or remake in this case.
There are no breakout performances, the chemistry is not chemistry, and the CGI work is not testimony to the times we are living in. This is not 1984 anymore and millennials do not want to see a movie about ghosts without any next-level CGI. Having an all-female cast of “Saturday Night Live” alumni and current stars was a selling point but director Feig failed to pull the trigger on that too. Once you bring a group of SNL stars, the levels of expectation rise.
The director did not meet this challenge. That said, like they did in the 2011 smash hit “Bridesmaids”, McCarthy, McKinnon and Wiig did try to bring on the funny. Leslie Jones is still to convince me that she is either funny or a good actress. The supporting cast bring little value and Chris Hemsworth proved once and for all that he does not have a funny bone in him. Andy Garcia and Cecily Strong, another “SNL” star, do an OK job but do not have enough material to work with.
The biggest disappointment is, however, Neil Casey as the film’s antagonist Rowan North. This is not an indictment of the guy’s talent, for I have seen little of his previous work, but more of a testimony to the writers’ weaknesses. There is no back story and no reason why anyone should care who Rowan North is.
“Ghostbusters’” biggest selling points were supposed to be nostalgia and the girl power thing. While it tanks in the latter, it does a decent job in the former. Cameos by originals like Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson; and Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts are a nice touch.
