- It's directed and co-written by Jason Reitman, a talented and successful director who is also the son of the original Ghostbusters movies, Ivan Reitman. Does his personal connection give me hope?
- Why are they ignoring/shelving the terrific Paul Feig Lady Ghostbusters movie? (short answer- misogynist Internet trolls won their war)
- Why does this sequel to an iconic Manhattan movie take place in Oklahoma? (short answer- it's cheaper)
- It doesn't look funny. Is it funny?
This movie is a disaster. It started soooo slowly. If my son weren't watching with me, and I hadn't promised not to sh!t all over his enjoyment of the movie, I would have walked out.
The premise: Evo Shandor, the guy who built Spook Central on Central Park West, built a second temple to Gozer inside the caves where he mined the selenium to build his Manhattan tower. Egon figures this out, either tells no one, or no one believes him, so he abandons the other Ghostbusters, decamps to Oklahoma, and spends the rest of his life as a recluse, keeping a lid on the threat of Gozer from emerging from the belly of the Earth and destroying us all.
When we join the movie, we meet Callie (Carrie Coon) a bitter single mother, forced to relocate her kids Phoebe and Trevor to her late father's tumbledown Oklahoma farmhouse. I am pretty sure we aren't told these are the daughter and grandkids of Egon Spengler right away? Annie Potts as former Ghostbuster receptionist (and Spengler love interest) Janine Melnitz appears early on. I am not sure if her purpose, besides fan service, is to tell the audience that the grandad was Egon, or to tell the audience that she is not Callie's mother, or both. We never find out who Callie's mother is. Why not?
Shortly thereafter, the bored and curious kids begin to unravel their family ghost busting history. At some point in there I realized what Jason Reitman and the studio decided: they saw the white-hot sensation Stranger Things as the angle to approach the material. They decided making a "teens investigate the paranormal" as the key to success.
What they didn't do is try to make a movie faithful in tone or content to the original. If you want to make a "teens investigate the paranormal" movie, because Stranger Things is popular, and you want to leverage that popularity, go for it. But that's not what the 1984 movie was about.
(I'm putting my Gen X Culture Police hat on for a minute here. this movie has the name Ghostbusters in it, so I have probable cause to do so.)
The 1984 movie is a comedy with some mild action and lots of special effects. It's about a hustler, a supernatural fanatic, an egghead, and a blue-collar striver, who get into ghostly hijinks in New York City, while the hustler tries to get into Sigourney Weaver's pants. One of the early SNL/SCTV pedigree comedies that we've seen ever since. Everyone smokes constantly. There's a ghost BJ dream sequence. It's a little bit scary once or twice. It's an Abbot & Costello movie with great special effects.
Afterlife is not. funny. at. all. It doesn't try to be funny, with one exception, and it's no praise at all to say "it's better to not try than try to be funny and fail." I'm still dwelling on the fact that the 1984 movie had Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Rick Moranis, four of the funniest stars of the decade, and they made a sequel with Carrie Coon, a bunch of kids, and...Paul Rudd.
Let's talk about Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd is a funny and charming actor. He's deeply likeable, and talented too. When in the writing process did they decide the movie needed some comedic relief? And is that why Rudd feels like he's in an entirely different movie than everyone else? Just because Rudd is friendly and charming does not mean he is automatically funny. His summer school teacher is so lazy, he just shows the kids old 80s movies on VHS tape. Making junior high school kids watch Cujo on VHS is mildly humorous at best.
The one scene where Rudd has an opportunity to be funny is the "chased by a Terror Dog" sequence, parallel to Rick Moranis's flight through Central Park in 1984. It begins in an obvious plug for Wal Mart, where Rudd is randomly shopping and comes across scores of tiny Stay-Puft marshmallow men. The marshmallow men attack him, he flees, and then he encounters, runs from, and is possessed by a Terror Dog. This is the movie's entire attempt at comedy. This Wal-Mart scene is seemingly airdropped into the screenplay. The marshmallow men come back at the end of the movie, but really have no purpose, and aren't even particularly funny.
None of the adventures Phoebe and Trevor get into are played for laughs, and while McKenna Grace is terrific as the wildly intelligent, brave, and perhaps on-the-spectrum middle schooler, and she's very reminiscent of her grandfather, she's no Bill Murray. Logan Kim is cute as the Milhouse-ian sidekick with a podcast, but he's no Dan Aykroyd either.
If you're thinking "it's unfair to compare the cast of this movie to the cast of the 1984 movie" I would reply "go see the 2016 Lady Ghostbusters movie". That film features four of the funniest adult actors working today (Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones), with a wildly successful comedy director (Paul Feig). It's a worthy reboot of the 1984 movie, that modernizes the vibe of the original. It just drives me up the twist that we had proof a reboot could be done, and it got tossed aside, and these two sequels are the new path we're stuck on.
Further Gripes:
The Setting - Taking a iconic Manhattan movie and setting its sequel in the middle of nowhere is a transparent cost-savings move and it's pathetic. Evo Shandor built his second temple in a cave in Oklahoma for zero plot reasons and one economic reason. I literally have trouble believing Egon was able to drive that 1959 Cadillac 1,500 miles to Oklahoma.
Carrie Coon as the mom. A talented actress, sure. Her deeply bitter and angry single mom sucks the fun and comedy out of this movie in every scene she's in. For a movie that trades on our love for the original Ghostbusters, having a lead character essentially say "I hate that guy" every time his name is uttered in her presence is a mistake. If Paul Rudd is in his own movie, then Carrie Coon is performing an a gritty drama, all by herself.
The Fan Service In 2016 I complained about the fan service in the Lady Ghostbusters movie, but there was so little compared to this one. Some I liked- you enter Egon's Oklahoma lab via fireman's pole. The Chomper ghost is a fun riff on Slimer. The local sherriff saying "Who ya gonna call" to Phoebe was perfect. But the reunion of the original gang at the end was cringey. Watching at home, I could feel the beats where Reitman held for applause, assuming the audiences would be cheering. I guess it worked okay. I had more trouble believing that Stantz could rally his teammates, and travel 1,500 miles with the busting gear, all in a few hours? If that's what I'm thinking about at the end of the movie, either the movie sucks or I'm the biggest turd in the punchbowl ever. My grade: D. Avoids flunking because I liked McKenna Grace so much.