Ghostbusters (2016)
1/2 (out of 4)
Wow, what on Earth were they thinking? I will freely admit that I love to see films remade. I mean, it gives the original some attention and in the best cases you end up with another good movie. In the worse cases, hey, you've still got the original film there. If anything this 2016 remake of GHOSTBUSTERS just makes the original all the more impressive because it's amazing how bad this thing is. And no, I'm not sexist or racist. I'm just being honest. I was okay with this film being made but it's really shocking how awful it turned out.
I'm not even sure where to begin in regards to the bad stuff. I guess we can start with the story because there really isn't a story. There's pretty much a bunch of stuff ripped off from the original movies and toned down here. The horror elements are all toned down. The sexism is toned down. There's really no "story" here outside of four women trying to capture ghosts. I kept watching this expecting something to happen but it just never did. Even worse is the fact that the film didn't make me laugh a single time, which gets us to another problem.
The four female leads here are just downright awful. I'm not going to put an awful lot of blame on them since I'm sure they'll all talented actresses but the screenplay pretty much gave them no characters. In the case of Melissa McCarthy, she's pretty much playing the same type of annoying character that she plays in all of her movies. Kristen Wiig was downright annoying, Leslie Jones was even more annoying and Kate McKinnon didn't even register on the screen.
Even the ghosts are downright pathetic and lazy. I use the word lazy because there's just nothing creative about them and once again it just goes to show how wonderful the original film was and they even make the stuff in the sequel seem better. I could go on and on about the awful stuff in this movie. I honestly had no idea the movie would turn out as bad as it did and it really makes you wonder why Bill Murray would refuse to do a sequel for so many years yet he'd sign up for this thing? I'm hoping he and the other cameos were paid quite well.
GHOSTBUSTERS is a film that could have worked and should have worked. I'm really dumbfounded as to what went so horribly wrong with this but just changing the sexes of a character certainly isn't enough to make a film work.
