Ghostbusters Review

Hell hath no fury like fan boys who’ve been royally pissed off by someone to have the cheek to remake a ‘classic’ film, because that’s what happens when a remake is done, it destroys all available copies of the original and makes remembering it a thought crime. Perhaps, it could instead be seen that a director like Paul Feig felt he had an approach on Ghostbusters that would make a remake worthwhile seeing.

                Feig’s vision of Ghostbusters sees 3 scientists and 1 street smart subway worker team up to investigate the seemingly increasing levels of paranormal activity in New York City, with a scheming villain named Rowan seeking to enhance the presence of the ghosts and ghouls in the big apple. Paul Feig’s films have a unique style to them, his comedy is lots and lots of jokes that come thick and fast and usually have quite a high hit rate. In his last film Spy, Feig showed he could tackle fight sequences just as well as he could handle puns, and the great joy of his Ghostbusters film is how well he tackles the creepy/spooky stuff, in an early sequence in a haunted house he manages to pull of spooky without ever being too scary to alienate the comedy.

                The greatest strength of Ghostbusters is the Ghostbusters themselves, Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig’s scientific investigators of the paranormal Abbie and Erin, Kate McKinnon’s whacky engineer Jillian Holtzmann, and Leslie Jones as font of all New York knowledge Patty. Between them is a chemistry that is really hard to fake, a chemistry you get the sense is as strong off screen as it is on and without it the film would suffer greatly. Their characters as individuals work to varying levels of success, though Wiig and McCarthy work well together, their characters are almost too similar in their qualities to distinguish one of them from the other, McCarthy is right to stray from her more brash characters of the past, but that then means Wiig needs to provide something different, there is however much joy to be taken from Wiig’s cringe-inducing ‘flirting’ with Chris Hemsworth’s hilariously stupid secretary. In the case of Leslie Jones its impressive that with her little experience in the way of film credits to her name, her on screen charisma is strong throughout, her ‘race-thing, lady-thing’ joke lands big, but her delivery of throwaway lines produce smiles throughout. The real breakout star of the piece however is McKinnon’s Holtzmann. Holtzmann will be a character that divides people, she’s far zanier and out there than any of the others and that might grate on people, but when you provoke as many laughs as Holtzmann does then you’re onto a winner, and it will be a hard moment to beat at the cinema this year seeing Holtzmann whipping out dual pistols of her own design before dispatching a series of ghosts.

                If there are problems with this reimagining, which there are, it’s that it doesn’t quite reimagine as much as it could. It often feels like a bit of a slave to the original and loses itself as it approaches its climax where it turns the CGI fest up to eleven. There’s also a villain that isn’t really a villain, Rowan isn’t really a character let alone an antagonist and the film was crying out for someone far more compelling for them to rally against.

                This probably doesn’t turn out to be quite as good as you want it to be, but what it has done is set really strong ground work to move on with, there will be more room to breathe in a sequel now that all the necessary nods to the original have been made, so for the love of God make sure this film does well at the box office, because 4 smart women saving the world and doing it without wearing tight shorts and vest tops is exactly what young female cinema goers need today. (High 3 Stars)