The Problem with ‘Ghostbusters’ isn’t the Women

It’s bad enough when a classic film is sullied by a subpar remake. (Hint: anybody excited about the Antoine Fuqua The Magnificent Seven, be prepared for disappointment; at least the original, itself a Seven Samurai riff, had the good sense to relocate from Japan to Mexico and cut its own trail.) All those tens of millions of dollars spent, just to tarnish a good and enjoyable memory. Even more wasteful, though, is the hurling of good money and energy at revamping of a film that was, well, no classic. Like Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters.

We passed the point of “classic” overuse right about the time that American Movie Classics became AMC and decided that, hell, Chuck Norris counted as an American Classic, right? But even so, over the years a truly unseemly, Goonies amount of love has been hurled at that oddball 1984 blockbuster where Second City snark and some subpar frattish humor meshed in so-so manner with a big-budget ghost apocalypse special-effects bonanza that seemed in itself a gag by guys who loved old B-movies.

But, hey, it was a rough year in America, which apparently needed the confidence-building boost that came from a few renegade parapsychology professors who weren’t afraid of no ghosts. It even channeled a curiously vehement anti-government rage at the height of the Reagan years by making its great villain not the spectral New Wave creature of the afterlife Gozer the Gozerian but instead a weasely little flunky from the Environmental Protection Agency. The sequel buried the original’s appeal, centered mostly on Bill Murray’s sublimely confident smirk and Bugs Bunny-like ability to avoid catastrophe, and that was that.

Only it wasn’t.

For the 2016 edition of Ghostbusters, director Paul Feig and his co-writer Katie Dippold went a different route. Instead of building the film around two edifices — a not-too-creepy otherworld of slime-spewing haunts and a highly sarcastic pseudo-scientist who never quite seems to believe in what he’s doing — the remake works within the basic parameters of the original’s story without bothering to give much life to them. As before, they raided Saturday Night Live for their cast. Unlike before, they discarded the more preadolescent male-skewing elements (no ghost sex or possessed babes in slinky outfits).

The general setup is chained to Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd’s original scenario. A trio of scientists working the outer limits of respectability by studying the paranormal lose their funding and set up shop as ghost researchers and freelance exorcists, calling themselves the Ghostbusters. Erin (Kristen Wiig) is the goody-two-shoes of the bunch, still annoyed that her long-estranged friend Abby (Melissa McCarthy, underplaying for once, to good effect) helped kill her dream of tenure at Columbia.

Meanwhile, Holtzman (Kate McKinnon) works as their crypto-steampunk Q, jerry-rigging Maker Faire laser-combat doohickeys for doing battle with ghosts. Holtzman delivers her left-field lines with a deadpan that rivals the great Murray, while Abby and Erin squabble over friendship, perceived slights, whether or not they should fire their new awfully pretty but terribly dumb receptionist, Kevin (Chris Hemsworth), and what to do with their new very non-scientific employee Patty (Leslie Jones).

There are few big changes here. Seemingly the biggest, and the one that had the male Internet anger army in full frothing comment rage was the fact that the leads are all now female instead of male. Such rightfully denounced idiocy aside, Feig and Dippold pay dutiful homage to the original’s plot pillars. Too much so, in fact. They stretch and yank the screenplay to hit a number of similar story beats, and go to great lengths to insert much of the original cast (Murray, Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, even Annie Potts) into cameos that are as awkwardly placed as they are bizarrely unfunny.

There is also the new film’s curious pacing, which feels both rushed and yet strained. Where the original’s director Reitman created a slow and steady build (once the hallmark of the decently crafted studio summer blockbuster), Feig doesn’t seem clear as to what kind of film he’s making. As with the last McCarthy action comedies that Feig directed (The Heat and Spy), his Ghostbusters strains to connect the lo-fi improv style of its leads with the big plot points and special-effects scenes needed to justify the eight- and nine-figure budgets.

As usual, Feig blasts enough gags around, shotgun-style, that several eventually hit. McKinnon’s spacey and slightly cracked presence, and Hemsworth’s droll doofiness both work wonders when the story starts to flag while the Ghostbusters chase down a highly uninteresting spectral threat facing New York (actually Boston, losing some of that Manhattan-adoring gleam the original celebrated).

Here’s what the new Ghostbusters doesn’t change: three white scientists recruit a working-class black person who is up for anything but doesn’t quite mesh with the original trio. Now, Wiig, McCarthy, and McKinnon make for one of the stronger comic trios in recent years. That’s true, even when grading on the curve that is the industry’s tendency toward mainstream comedies that hunt down the lowest common denominator and clung to it for dear life. But do we really think that the only way to fit a person of color into this unit was to introduce Jones as an MTA employee?

Even more insultingly, Feig’s film straightjackets Jones into a character placed there mostly for exposition purposes. This squelches that TNT delivery of hers which could have helped wake up the film’s many snoozier stretches.

No, the problem with the new Ghostbusters isn’t that the new cast is female. The problem is that a deviously funny comedy cast was roped to a project that spends more time checking items off a list (hearse, slime, and so on) than it does giving its stars room to do what they do. In a film with as little sense of comic timing as this, even Murray’s “he slimed me” would have fallen flat.

Title: Ghostbusters
Director: Paul Feig
Writer: Katie Dippold, Paul Feig
Cast: Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Chris Hemsworth, Neil Casey, Charles Dance, Ed Begley Jr., Zach Woods
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Year of release: 2016
Rating: PG-13
Web site: http://www.ghostbusters.com/ghostbusters-2016/