The first name in the end credits of "Ghostbusters" is a certain Zach Woods, who is listed as playing a tour guide. Because people are listed by order of appearance, it felt like entire days had passed since that character was on screen. Suffice to say, the 2016 re-envisaging of an 80's family favourite which spawned one sequel and its own cartoon series, "Ghostbusters", is a complete slog - too long and ultimately not much more than a fancy demonstration of what the latest in special effects are capable of. Most of its moments, particularly in the final act, exist for TV-spots and trailers - a little stunt followed by a one-liner. Its product placement is shameless and most prevalent in the first hour, during which I suppose it is assumed the audience is still paying the most attention; its popular culture references often painful - please don't remind us of 'the mayor in Jaws', because you're just reminding us of a better film. Maybe you're on-side for a while, but boy does that bell-curve drop off fast.
The film covers four women, though lacks any real protagonist, aged between about thirty and forty-five in modern New York City. Erin (Kristen Wiig) is a lecturer at Columbia university who, on the cusp of a promotion, is horrified to discover an old friend named Abby (Melissa McCarthy) promoting something pseudo-scientific via the Internet to do with ghost-hunting that they both toyed with in their university days - something Erin fears her bosses might discover and be put off by. We get a sense of the different routes these women have gone down when Erin pays Abby a visit, whose wacky metallic helmet she has on when we first see her I think is designed to call to mind Emmett Brown's and is meant to infer a sense of the mad scientist who aims high, but often falls flat. Erin, by comparison, wears tweed and speaks more eloquently.
Rather than set things straight, Wiig's character is pulled along to an investigation Abby conducts with a younger assistant named Jillian (Kate McKinnon), whose later role in the film is to essentially invent a new contraption whenever the script needs it, at an old haunted house which we watched rattle that tour guide during the opening. It is here the film tries to replicate the memorable scene in the 1984 original, when the eponymous heroes go down into a haunted library and encounter something which takes us all by surprise, but it doesn't quite come off here - it doesn't find that place in-between scary and funny that Reitman found. Regardless, Erin changes her mind; loses both her promotion and job at the behest of a stuffy Charles Dance and moves in with Abby and Jillian to prove the world wrong via the pseudo-science of ghost hunting which, turns out, isn't so pseudo...
What the film branches out into from here is a curious mix of genre-tropes; patchy storytelling; some decent gags and a lot of family friendly action scares which, collectively, often fail to justify as to why the remake exists. The women, true to tradition, find a disused space the size of a warehouse to open their titular operation while a fourth member, Leslie Jones' Patty, who conspicuously leaves her stable job as a subway ticket inspector to join this farce, obtains an old hearse that they use as an official vehicle. They hire a receptionist to take calls, a bespectacled simpleton played by Chris Hemsworth named Kevin, who is funny at first, but whose idiocy eventually becomes so unbelievable that you'd think it was the prototype to a new Sacha Baron Cohen character. Erin likes him for his looks; in contrast to three of the women, who are skilled scientists and inventors, Kevin is a buffoon, which if the roles were reversed, and the blonde imbecile was female, would be rightly derided as sexist. And where is all the money coming from to pay for any of this?
The film's gender politics, which has so consumed the project and the response to it in the aftermath of its release that rational textual analysis has been tossed aside, seems to gravitate along the frequency of pushing more girls into science, a popular ideological trope amongst contemporary feminism. But this is all surface. McKinnon, who joyfully brings to life the character of Jillian with a series of piercing stares; cheeky smirks and robotic movements, just does not ultimately strike us as a convincing inventor when viewed critically.
What's more, it too often feels as if the ideology itself has picked the wrong subject matter for the politick to hand: if we usurped the four women and replaced them with male counterparts at script stage, but kept every scene; action and line of dialogue the same, nothing would change within the contextualised framework. The best feminist texts at the moment in a filmic sense, if that is what you're into, are probably coming out of the Middle East, where actual female-centric narratives and stories about women's issues are being produced, and often by actual women.
A character by the name of Rowan fills in for the film's idea of antagonist; well, for most of the time. He's a young, funny looking kid with a strange expression and curly hair who works at a hotel and plots something nasty with evil spirits whom he cannot yet release. A fascist, and so an easy villain to pen, he believes that society cannot be cleansed enough of its undesirables due to past grievances. Neil Casey does what he can with the role, certainly channelling Peter MacNicol from the second film in appearance, but it is a thankless task. Wracking my brain, it is difficult to entirely envisage what a Ghostbusters remake 25 years after the fact was supposed to look like and why it might be at all needed. Was it really necessary? I'm unconvinced it was.
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