I walked out of Ghostbusters fully confident of the A-rating I was going to give it. I had my arguments all prepared of why this and that critic was wrong. Thank God I let my thoughts stew for a couple of days. While Ghostbusters is still a good film, it falls just shy of the Theatre Worthy category and right smack dab into the Folding Clothes Movie category.
Physics professor Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) is trying to get her tenure at Columbia University. When a book on ghosts and the paranormal she wrote with her friend Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) suddenly resurfaces on Amazon and threatens her credibility, Erin seeks out Abby to get her to take the book down. In a pretty direct movement of events, an encounter with a ghost ends up teaming the ladies up with two other ladies to become the Ghostbusters.
Overall, I think the movie suffered from just plain trying too hard at times. The funniest jokes in film (as in real life) are usually the ones that occur naturally and a lot of the humor here was forced unfortunately. It's hard justifying a high score for a movie when the funniest characters are the ones without primary roles. There are quite a few corny moments where the jokes fall extremely flat, but side characters like Bennie the delivery guy (Karan Soni) keep the movie from falling too deep into the muck.
For all of its wrong-doings, Ghostbusters does a great job of paying homage to the original movies while trying to establish a sense of originality. There are quite a few cameos (none of which I will ruin) that will squeeze a couple of chuckles out of fans of the older movies. On the newer side of things, I appreciated some of the interesting gadgets that were introduced. Scientist Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) shows us that there's clearly more than one way to catch a ghost. Getting to see those gadgets in action turned out to be pretty cool to watch. It also gave us a chance to see more of the weird, quirky Jillian who was the funniest of the Ghostbusters by a landslide. Without her and Chris Hemsworth who played Kevin the awful receptionist, this movie would have been a true trainwreck.
I'm rooting for this series to succeed and I hope they find out a way to make the second film funnier. It's probably going to start with improving the lines of Leslie Jones. Almost all of her jokes were a miss and it made her stick out like a sore thumb. It was cringe-worthy at times.
Liked it. Didn't love it. Rent it. Save yourself a trip and some money. I give it a 73.
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