Frightful sequel featuring lame cameos from original stars
Ghostbusters: Afterlife 12A cert, 124 min
★★★★★
Dir: Jason Reitman
Starring: Mckenna Grace, Finn Wolfhard, Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, Logan Kim, Celeste O’connor, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson
OIt’s as if Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd were coaxed over from the local golf course
ne of the biggest mysteries surrounding the original Ghostbusters film is whether or not its most zealous admirers realise what it actually is. The recent all-female reboot was condemned by a noisy faction of the fandom as a rank betrayal of everything the brand stood for: instead, just a group of Saturday Night Live comedians swapping crude wisecracks in front of sparkly special effects, and treating the noble art of ghostbusting as if it was a sort of slapstick pest control.
Of course, that’s exactly what the 1984 version was too – but when you’re 10 or under, tongue-in-cheek can be a hard tone to detect, let alone comprehend, and even a giant marshmallow man can feel freighted with gravitas. So to have a formative childhood experience made light of by women – well, what kind of fan with an internet connection and a latent misogynistic streak would stand for that?
So when Ghostbusters: Afterlife is hailed as the return of Ghostbusters-asit-should-be, what that means is it’s the film that takes ghostbusting seriously – which is a bit like being the film that takes Caddyshack seriously, or which promises a wistful revisiting of Uncle Buck. Nostalgia isn’t the mood here, but the entire genre: like Stranger Things, the template is the rose-tinted small-town fantasy adventures that were being made by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment in the 1980s.
Classic costumes, props and even surviving cast members are all dutifully wheeled out like heirlooms to be cooed at. (The technical term for this, I regret to inform you, is “legacyquel”.) To keep the bloodline extra-pure, it was directed and co-written by Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first film and its less fondly remembered 1989 sequel – though a polite veil is drawn over the canonical status of that one. Perhaps inevitably, the recent Paul Feig version is explicitly struck from the record: one character even makes a point of remarking on the total lack of spectral mayhem in the United States since the 1980s, and that’s that, so yah-boo-sucks to the girls.
The setting is a faded mining town in the middle of nowhere, where Egon Spengler, the first-generation Ghostbuster played in the 1980s films by the late Harold Ramis, mysteriously retreated long ago to a tumbledown farmhouse built in the early Scoobydoo style, with a stockpile of proton packs and pedal-operated traps. After his death, the place is inherited by his estranged daughter Callie (Carrie Coon, ill-served) and her children Trevor (Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) have come to live. The youngsters unearth their grandfather’s old equipment, and soon enough a portal to the netherworld has been inadvertently prised open, and must be sealed back up with the assistance of some old hands. Yes, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson all make a theoretically triumphant return, although their big comeback scene has a strangely ad hoc feel, as if the cameras started rolling and they were coaxed over from a nearby golf course.
As for their former co-star Ramis, who died in 2014, it’s no spoiler to say the film finds a workaround, which maximises fanbase pandering while hoping you don’t think too hard about the queasy ethics underpinning it, or the obvious way in which it flouts the film’s internal logic. But wishfulfilment is the only move Ghostbusters: Afterlife seems prepared to attempt: the plot essentially just imagines what might happen if teens in a small town had access to ghostbusting kit. The old Ecto-1 vehicle is dusted off for a chase down the main street with a charmless Slimer understudy called Muncher, while the kids’ amiable teacher, Paul Rudd’s Mr Grooberson, is menaced by a gang of miniature Stay-puft marshmallow men, in a scene which feels like a cover version of the famous dancing cream cake sequence from Young Sherlock Holmes.
The effects have a pleasingly retro patina, but the action itself is drab, the jokes scarce, while the town itself is both entirely characterless and oddly deserted, giving the impression that nothing’s really at stake. It’s just what we were warned about all those years ago: something weird that don’t look good.
In cinemas now