JULY 18, 2016
“Ain’t no bitches gonna hunt no ghosts.”
That is one of Melissa McCarthy’s most memorable lines in the new all-female remake of “Ghostbusters,” but it could also represent the sentiment behind the smear campaign that has made “Ghostbusters” by far the most controversial film of the summer.
When Sony Pictures released the first trailer for the summer release earlier this year, the internet exploded with outrage by fanboys at the very idea that their beloved 1984 original would be desecrated by a remake, and even worse, their favorite male characters would be played by women! (“Girls? Yuck!”) Internet trolls crawled up from their mother’s basements to tweet the most vile invective toward the film’s director Paul Feig. And months before a frame of the finished film was ever shown, trolls flooded the Internet Movie Database’s viewer rating site to give the movie a 1, the lowest grade possible.
The controversy understandably rattled Sony Pictures which is on the hook for the film’s reported $140 million cost (plus an equal amount spent in promotion and advertising), which means that the film will have to be a smash in order for Sony to get a dime back.
The first weekend’s gross was very good, but not great, as the film reportedly grossed $46 million but still finished behind the second week of “The Secret Life of Pets.” Word of mouth will tell the tale.
The good news is that the film is pretty good. (Take that, trolls!) Critical reaction was largely positive (73% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), which may help to give the film a long run, something that previous Feig films with McCarthy (“Bridesmaids,” “The Heat” and last year’s “Spy”) have achieved.
Enough background…let’s get to “Ghostbusters.” The big question — is it funny? I would say that the answer to that is definitely yes. Feig has always had a way with an unexpected line, as he showed most prominently in his script for “Spy,” and, together with his co-writer Katie Feppold, he has come up with a bunch of laugh-out-loud moments that come at you from out of the blue.
The set-up in this reboot is that Dr. Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) and Dr. Abby Yates (McCarthy) once wrote a book together on paranormal phenomena that flopped, prompting a falling out between the two friends. Erin is on the tenure track at Columbia University, while Abby continues to research ghosts at a rinky-dink college across town. But when unexplained ghost sightings begin around New York, the friends bury the hatchet and team up, along with Abby’s gadget-minded colleague Dr. Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and sympathetic MTA worker Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) to become the Ghostbusters.
Feig stands alone among working directors today who are smart enough to simply let funny women be funny, and he has cast quite a quartet of comic actors — 2 Feig veterans in McCarthy and Wiig along with two breakout SNL stars in McKinnon and Jones. Together they have such chemistry that watching them interact makes the first 2/3 of the film an absolute joy. If there is a breakout star of this “Ghostbusters,” it’s definitely McKinnon who makes her scientist such a whack-job that you look forward to her every appearance just to hear what she’s going to say and how McKinnon is going to say it.
Feig even turns the tables on the cliche role of the blonde bimbo secretary. Yes, there is a blonde bimbo in this “Ghostbusters,” and his name is Kevin (Chris Hemsworth). He’s absolutely studly and a total lunkhead, and Hemsworth’s delivery allows him to steal every scene he’s in. (By the way, don’t leave when the credits start to roll, or else you’ll miss a fabulous dance number by Hemsworth that’s an absolute hoot.)
Unfortunately, this is “Ghostbusters,” so the final 1/3 of the film is dominated by the CGI apparitions, and most of the character fun is put on the back burner. It’s well done as CGI goes, but the computerized stuff gets very old very quickly and dissipates much of the good will that the film has built up to that point.
You may have heard that most of the surviving stars of the ’84 film are here, and even a few of the creatures show up. It’s a nice idea, but after the 3rd or 4th “Hey look, there’s…,” those moments begin to take you out of the movie you’re watching and make you think of the original. I might have preferred the new film to stand on its own and not be a constant reminder of what came before.
Just the way the Ghostbusters wield their laser guns to zap the ghosts, so has Feig zapped the internet trolls who tried to sink the film by making a good movie about which audiences can now judge for themselves. Or as McCarthy says early in the film,
“You’re not supposed to listen to what crazy people write in the middle of the night online.”
GRADE: B
