Ghost Bridesmaids! (Duh-Duh Doo-Doo Doo-Doo)

When I purchased tickets to see the Ghostbusters remake last week I was genuinely excited. Usually I’m pretty cynical about film releases, especially remakes, but I had heard nothing but good about this movie. Everyone talked about how it was just as good as the original, if not better. Naturally I had to see it for myself.

While I definitely enjoyed the movie, it left an odd taste in my mouth. There was something off from the very first scene, like a splinter in my mind. Once our two main characters, Dr. Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) and Dr. Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wig) met for the first time on screen it hit me. The film didn’t feel like Ghost Busters. It felt like Bridesmaids. In the original Ghost Busters, the humor was mostly focused on the dialogue (“This man has no dick”). This new Ghost Busters movie focused more on slapstick and on the flaws of the main characters. Much like the original Bridesmaids was more about the awkward social roles that female friends fill with some slapstick sprinkled in, the humor in this new Ghostbusters was very much the same way.

I’ve got no real problem with this, I guess, I loved Bridesmaids. So I figured that the rest of the film would just be a retelling of the old Ghostbusters with Bridesmaids humor.

I was wrong.

BridesBusters takes everything that you knew about capturing the ghosts and throws it in the trash. In all but a few cases, the main characters don’t catch the ghosts so much as beat the ever-loving hell out of them. The box they use to capture the ghosts gets maybe 2 minutes of screen time. Usually they just punch, shoot, slap, whip and snark the undead until they evaporate. At a certain point you wonder, “wouldn’t a photon assault rifle have done the job just as well?”

The writers also fail to give any of the serious dialogue any sense of weight. A lot of lines in the film made me roll my eyes but what really took the cake was, “Erin, come one, you’re the best at Quantum Physics!”

Wait. Hold up. Pardon me? ‘the best at Quantum Physics’? That doesn’t even make sense! The line is delivered as though Quantum Physics is a sport or a hobby that they regularly see Erin do. And if Erin really is so good at Quantum Physics why is she performing so terribly in the academic field? If Erin is the one who’s so great at quantum physics, why does Jillian (Kate McKinnon) pull all of the intellectual weight around here?

Jillian invents all of the groups weapons and gadgets, she theorizes everything about the ghosts and how they work and she does a huge amount of the fighting. I mean, Bill Murray was a hack in the original, but he never tried to pretend he wasn’t.

What I’m ultimately wondering, even now as I type, is why this film was called Ghostbusters. Seriously, why didn’t anyone in the writing process go ‘Huh, this really doesn’t have much to do with Busting Ghosts. Why not just make our own movie?’