Director: Jason Reitman
Cast: Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, McKenna Grace, Paul Rudd
Have I Seen it Before: Well… We’ll get to that.
Did I Like It: As I fully expected, I would be remiss to not spend a little bit of time in this review talking about Ghostbusters (2016). That movie was perfectly fine and more than a little funny. Sure, it looks like it was definitely filmed in front of a green screen for large stretches, instead of any New York I might recognize. I’ve never understood why that film had to be a total reboot. By 2016, Ghostbusters could have been a nationwide franchise, and that could have been the story of one of those franchisees with very little changed*. I saw Answer the Call in theaters twice. I bought it on Blu Ray. I’ve bought ever comic book that featured those characters. We—and by we, I mean America—did Ghostbusters (2016) dirty. It stinks that the movie became a political cause at a time when nearly every political cause only served to nauseate, and there was never a way a Ghostbusters film was going to be any fun when it was an issue we all had to take sides on. We now have twice as many Ghostbusters films as we did just over five years ago, and you all nearly ruined it.
Now, that I have taken up for the maligned, I feel like I can say that I looked forward to this film with more than a moderate amount of anticipation. The notion of a sequel to Ghostbusters II (1989) progressively felt like a shaky idea, especially after the death of Harold Ramis in 2014. But this film largely makes a case for itself in ways with which any other version of a direct continuation would have struggled. Ramis is given his hero’s sendoff, and Egon Spengler is a very real part of the movie. The remaining Ghostbusters appear sparingly, which is about right. I always said I never really wanted a Ghostbusters III, I was always more interested in a trailer, and that’s about the amount—aside from post-credits scenes—we get. The new characters are charming, and I feel sad for the five-year-old me who never got to see the Ghostbusters descend on Oklahoma. The film is fun, I’ll buy it on Blu Ray just as soon as it is available, and will delightfully consume any additional stories featuring the new characters, should they be in another movie or some other kind of ancillary material.
Here’s the problem: the film threatens to completely fall apart when it is desperate to recreate moments from the first film. Not characters and cast, mind you, actual scenes. Making Gozer the villain of the piece again, we see more comedies of error about Keymasters and Gatekeepers, that the whole thing almost, kind of, veers dangerously close to Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998) territory. I don’t give two shits about Gozer the Gozerian, Ivo Shandor, Zuul, or the rest. They should have gone with something new. That’s one more thing the last Ghostbusters film got right, and well… also got wrong in a post credits sequence, now that I’m thinking about it.
*That change could have also allowed them to not be essentially retconned out of existence with this entry, which would have made all the correct people furious all over again. But I digress, and that’s why that thought is footnote.