Ghostbusters: Afterlife

 2021, d. Jason Reitman - amazonprime

Woof. What a f*cking dog of a movie.

There are some people for whom Ghostbusters is their thing, their cultural obsession.  I have many things...Star Wars, comics, sci-fi, standup and sketch comedy etc....but I'm more of a generalist.  I know to be obsessive about, well, anything is a road to being legitimately angry and deeply wounded when a product doesn't work out like you want it to, or when others criticise it and you're much more forgiving of its flaws. Who needs that. With Ghostbusters as a property, I've always liked the original film, and I have a bit of nostalgia for some of the cartoon's toys from back in the day, but that's about it.  The property kind of died on the vine for me, it never got to make wine and live a second life. 

I've been following along with the threats of sequels and reboots to the franchise for nearly two decades.  Paul Feig's take at a reboot in 2016, you may be quick to forget, was not received well, especially by the loudest and most hateful people on the internet, and they made sure everyone knew it.  As a movie it was amusing but also messy, but certainly not worth any of the fuss around it (Leslie Jones got death threats...that's absurd).  

Jason Reitman, son of the director of the original and its sequel, came in with his own specific take, one that he figured would both appeal to those disgusting trolls that disguise themselves as fans, and to the general populace of people who remember the original Ghostbusters movie was pretty dang special.  He was oh, so wrong.

His take is primarily 2 hours of nostalgia bait and fan service with illogical leaps in logic, continuity errors, boring characters and a whole lot of nonsense.

If you remember Ghostbusters at all, it basically posits that Egon discovered that Zuul is still a threat and that he was the only one who could stave off what was to come.  In order to do so, Egon just abandoned his family for 30 years (!) to live his life out in a farmhouse in Oklahoma.  He died trying to capture some ghost or another and bequeathed his house to his daughter, Callie (the always captivating Carrie Coon), a single mother down on her luck who has no choice but to move her and her teenagers into her estranged father's creepy place.  

The kids are of split minds until Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) spies a girl at a carhop he instantly crushes on, and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) finds Grampa Egon's old gear laying around.  While Trevor's just a bit of a fuckup goofball like his mom, Phoebe is the eccentric teen-genius cliche like Grandpa and understands rather quickly how to soup up gramps' old stuff.  It also helps that Egon is now a spectre in the home and can help point things out to her.

Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) enters the picture as the science teacher at the local high school, but that's just his cover as he investigates strange seismology readings in the area. He gets instantly starts crushing on Callie, who in turn appreciates the attention.

For a time, there's a mystery teased out about what Egon was doing in this place, but as the mystery starts revealing itself and more and more it starts connecting directly with the events of the first Ghostbusters (which it does more and more and more as the film wanes on), the more and more I checked out.  While I was in for the dusty mid-western small-town slice of life with a bit of paranormal activity, I really couldn't stand all the winking the film continuously did in my direction...and then it goes from winking to full on overt showing you all the toys it still has from childhood for an hour.  The kids started to overstay their welcome even before the halfway point, and making Rudd the de facto audience surrogate of a Ghostbusters-fanboy who already knows all about the traps and proton packs was a step beyond for even Rudd's seemingly endless charm to make credibly work.

The best part of the movie is Rudd and Coon flirting with each other.  These are two attractive, charismatic performers who just know how be charismatic and attractive with other people on screen.  They need a romantic comedy immediately.  The film uses the idea of a woman learning about the mission of the parent who abandoned her as a means of closure for that character, but it never truly cares about exploring the emotions behind it.   It's just her character trait that she's angry at her dad, and it's just her points A-to-B that she forgives him in the end despite never properly exploring her journey at all.  The kids really have no journey either, except that maybe instead of just being losers they're Ghostbusters now (you know how popular they were in the reality of this movie...that's got to do wonders for those kids social lives).  

The climax of the film finds the family saved by deus ex Ghostbuster, with Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, Ernie Hudson and the phantasm of Harold Ramis...a literally ghoulish effect that surprisingly works, until it doesn't.  This is a film that doesn't know restraint, and they overuse spirit Ramis to a cloying degree.  This film could have easily moved from the one-star disaster it is, to a 2 1/2 star acceptable piece had it just let go of trying to connect itself to the events of the first film.  The threat being so familiar is its biggest weakness, among many weaknesses.  There's also better movie if it's focused on Callie and actually cares about what she thinks and feels, and perhaps, you know, connects with her dad in a way she never could when he was alive through his stuff and his mission.  It really makes Egon look like a huge asshole though.  And the mother just is never mentioned.

There's a lot of puzzling things, including a line of dialogue where Ray Stanz says that the Firehall has been destroyed only to have a post credits sequence of millionaire mogul Winston Zeddmore open the doors to the derelict (totally not destroyed) building.  There's also a nonsense mid-credits of Murray and Sigourney Weaver (in her only appearance) reenacting the ESP test from the first film.  It's cute but makes zero sense why it exists.  Bokeem Woodbine shows up as the sheriff of the Oklahoma town for the sum total of one scene.  There's a whole sequence in a Wal-Mart that's literally just an ad for Wal-Mart starring Paul Rudd for four minutes, but again, can't escape being nostalgic as it shoehorns in mini Stay Puft Marshmallow Men who act like Minions or Gremlins or some form of company-directed "we need something cute and funny to sell to the kids".  F*cking ridiculous the lot of it.

I think the only place Ghostbusters can live again is in cartoons, where you can give people the sequel(s) that they way with the characters that they want.   But as long as there's any juice in this intellectual property the purple suits (as Toasty calls 'em) are going to wring that rind dry, I just don't think I need to pay any more attention.