Let’s start with the big one: If you think this movie is good, you’re a fucking moron. I have no other way to put it. Nothing was right about this movie except for, strangely enough, the casting. After watching it I firmly believe that there is a script where you still get these 4 women and you have a good Ghostbusters movie. This one though, is just bad. It isn’t okay, it isn’t middling, this movie is fucking bad. I’m going to stream of concious this shit because the only thing I could say was that I hated it. I don’t mean like “hate” it, I mean that my brain didn’t let me say any other sentence. The theater was packed and I hated the people that packed it, I hated the people that laughed at all the terrible mistimed humor…Matter of fact there were three little girls that walked out super happy out of the move and I fucking hated them too; you know what I still hate those three little bitches and how shitty they’re gonna grow up to be because of this movie.
This movie is bad because the writing is bad. You are allowed to hate Paul Feig. There is one important detail the original ghostbusters has that this one doesn’t: it was written by two of the actors who starred in it. This may seem more like a footnote than anything until you consider what it does for the performances. The people writing the comedy, which was dry at times and also made good use of a straight man, were the people involved in acting it out. Scenes were written with the delivery in mind. This matters because everybody has natural rhythms to how they speak; funny has a rhythm to it too. There were a handlful of scenes that managed to nail the cast’s rhythm for the jokes. Why only a few? Because the people telling the jokes aren’t writing them. Pretty sure that if you let Wiig, McCarthy and Jones rewrite things so that it fits their styles better, you have an overall funnier movie. This is evident in the few scenes where it seems that they all nail the why of their character and then it goes back to the same shit. There are a few scenes where you see what could’ve been and then it falls apart again.
The movie also went in with an agenda. The big issue in Ghostbusters is that you have these random people being ghostbusters and shit is crazy. In this version, too much of it feels like its about these women proving they can be ghostbusters. These jokes fall flat the majority of the time. Only one that really worked was in the beginning they put up a video on youtube. Wiig’s character reads one of the comments and it says “Ain’t no bitches gonna bust ghosts.” That joke works for a couple of reasons: 1) sure there are people who don’t believe women can do anything, 2) but dealing with bullshit comments on the internet is a shared experience. That pervades the movie too much to the detriment of the actresses. Its a part of the female experience, I get that. Unfortunately all it does is make for shitty scenes that constantly tell you that these are women trying to do it rather than these are 4 smart people doing it. Shit man, you could’ve written a script about capable people and they happen to be these four women but instead they went with look at these four women ooh and they are also totally scientists and they still have to do with bullshit. It almost seems like the script was written after they announced it was going to be four women instead of already having a good idea of what four women ghostbusting looks like (shit sucks but it’ll look a lot like 4 men ghostbusting for a lot of it). blah.
So we have Hemsworth, Jones and McKinnon. Hemsworth played a moron receptionist that’s supposed to be hot but all that they gave him to do was ass. They could’ve easily had the dolt thing worked but punted it hard. McKinnon was legitimately cooning. I don’t know how you get a scientist character to coon for science but that’s what it was. Einstein Bojangles is all that you really get from this character. The entire movie she basically does with the smirk of “Isn’t my character so fucking cool, look at me being so cool and funny and building shit”. Leslie Jones character also falls hard because they just let Leslie Jones do Leslie Jones shit; which amounts to really shit OH LOL I’M SO BLACK I DO THINGS THIS WAY. What makes this even more terrible is that there are parts where you go “oh shit, right on this is gonna be a legit character.” Patty (jones’ character) knows a lot about the history of the city. There are times where she is informative about a lot of random NYC history that three scientists wouldn’t know. Unfortunately this never gets used to good effect. It would’ve been easy to give her some lines where she has an interaction like:
“Oh hell no”
“What’s wrong patty?”
“We can’t do X, Y or Z here because this happened.”
She gets to do this twice but it doesn’t combine her humor with the character. So you get Patty and you get Leslie Jones in scenes. This, as much as many of the things that happened in this movie, are a disservice to the actress/actor. McKinnon is still the worst because you could easily have merged all that she did with Jones’ character and the movie would’ve gone on in the same way. The original ghostbusters wasn’t a paragon of character development mind you, but a lot of these characters were flatter than Taylor Swift’s ass. Raz0r would’ve been all over these flats if they were in tight jeans.
The special effects weren’t bad. They have that weird bright motiff that can be off putting to some. The real issue is that a lot of the ghosts made no sense. Why is there a gargoyle “ghost” flying around a metal concert? who died there and why do they get to be gargoyle? What’s up with the guy on stilts? Did he die with stilts on? How the hell are there ghosts of the Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons?
None of that shit makes sense. As a matter of fact, it makes as much sense as the fact that they were killing ghosts. That’s also something that’s even shittier. Weird aside so you understand why I’m extra bothered by it. A lot of the stuff aimed at girls isnt “cool”. Anything that has women doing cool things is great. Doesn’t really matter what it is, sometimes people need to know that they can. This is why it feels like its pandering. I didn’t understand this until I handed a student one of my M:TG decks that had a signed card in it. Told her it was signed by a pro player I beat, she asked me what HIS name was and I told the girl that HER name was Melissa De Tora. During that tiny conversation it hadn’t occurred to her that she could be playing magic or be successful at it (of course this with caveats M:TG isn’t a damn career but still). So the really shitty part is that the women go into this huge scene where they are going to fuck some shit up and its all supposed to look cool. It all looks like shit. None of it was fucking cool. It was the force type of cool. The type of cool that borders on corny. The “lets give everybody a moment with all these bullshit gadgets we made this character with no character make up because she is the cool scientists and now this needs to lead somewhere otherwise things make even less sense” type of cool. Instead we get some bleh moment where they are basically killing ghosts and a bunch of shit doesn’t make sense. We get ghost grenades, ghost shotgun, ghost dual weilding hand guns and ghost fragging and it all looks really damn lame.
Rowan was okay. OG ghostbusters don’t have the world’s best explained villain either and it doesn’t fully detract from the movie. What we do get in the OG Ghostbusters is that the men get to be successful Ghostbusters getting calls and all that other fun. Female ghostbusters get stuck trying to be women who are ghostbusters. You know what, they needed and deserved to get that same success as in the original script. They should’ve shown them establishing themselves and all that other fun. Instead we get that this is supposed to be the movie that establishes things because people want that Marvel multi year swag.
This movie is all sorts of ass and it hurts everybody. It hurts long time fans because they got a bad movie from a franchise they really loved, new people because this movie is fucking ass, and it really hurts the four women who have been taking massive amounts of shit that was undue to them. Its funny because Paul Feig went out of his way to make sure he delivered on all of the reasons why we were worried it’d be four women at the helm. But the problem is that the four women weren’t the problem: it was one man promising to spite millions of fans for not being hype for 4 women.
Blame all of this on Paul Feig. He is basically the sole reason why everything went to shit every for everything. Literally written and directed by a guy wanting to fucking ruin everyting. I’m sure I have more vitriol for random things in this movie but I’m out of steam at the moment. Little girls like it so YaY I guess. Oh and morons, my theater was packed but only half the audience laughed at anything. they are the reason why my city sucks major dick, that half of the audience can go drown itself the next time it rains here.
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The self-imposed wait was worth it. Maybe your sacrifice wasn’t senseless, if only because of the sheer schadenfreude here.
