A collection of comic skits strung together Ghostbusters

Director: Paul Feig Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Chris Hemsworth The reboot of feels like a comedy sketch stretched well beyond its natural running time to feature length. Its initial appeal very quickly wears off. There is only so much green ectoplasm that the film can dish up without the new all-female team of

becoming stuck in it. The same gags are repeated here again and again, with diminishing returns. The four very lively, very over-stated central performances soon begin to grate.

Kristen Wiig plays Erin Gilbert, a prim, conservatively dressed academic, seen as “an asset to modern physics”. Erin is close to achieving her ambition of securing tenure at a top Ivy League college and she is determined to keep very quiet about the book on ghosts she wrote with her now estranged friend Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy). The college dean of studies (Charles Dance in sneering, supercilious form) makes it very clear to Erin that there is no place in academia for anyone silly enough to take spooks seriously. That is why Erin is so upset that Abby is hyping up her book online.

Director Feig, who worked with McCarthy and Wiig on the raucous comedy Bridesmaids, likes his jokes about vomiting, goo and bodily fluids. He begins the film in bravura fashion with a haunted house sequence in which a tour guide is terrorised by an evil harpy who causes staircases to crumble beneath him. Feig orchestrates this initial mayhem with vigour while also throwing in plenty of droll gags.

takes pleasure in reversing some old sexist stereotypes. There’s an attractive, dim-witted blond working with the spook-hunters — but that’s the Chris Hemsworth character, Kevin, their blissfully stupid secretary/ receptionist. He is in the film primarily as eye candy (Erin, in particular, lusts after him) and also to be the butt of as many jokes as possible.

The film wriggles throughout on the horns of a dilemma. It can’t work out just how tongue in cheek it wants to be. On the one hand, Feig is very deliberately going back to the 80s and trying to give a homemade, nostalgic feel to affairs. There’s a half-hearted cameo from one of the original team, Bill Murray, this time playing a naysayer who scorns the work of the Ghostbusters.

We even get a late glimpse of Sigourney Weaver. Abby’s whirring, hand-held fan device for detecting ghouls looks like a very cheap toy. So do the guns. Kate McKinnon’s character, laconic, tough-talking engineer Jillian Holtzmann, dresses as if she is Madonna in her Desperately Seeking Susan period.

The new team has offices above a Chinese restaurant. The ghost hunters wear boiler suits that make them look like refuse collectors and they drive to their missions in a clapped out old hearse. At the same time, this is a summer blockbuster which has its share of Independence Daystyle special effects as ghosts run amok in New York. All four of the Ghostbusters are skilled comediennes who know just how to deliver a punchline. This, though, is part of the problem. They perform as if they are in a sitcom, waiting for the canned laughter. None of the characters is developed in any meaningful way. The film is a collection of comic skits strung together in a scattergun fashion.

Some are funny enough. Leslie Jones (as a New York subway worker turned Ghostbuster) combines abrasiveness and self-deprecation in a very effective fashion. McCarthy is in enjoyably subversive form as the team leader. The more beatifically she smiles, the more mischief you know she is planning.

Feig throws in stunts and gags in an increasingly desperate and cartoonish fashion. Characters fall out of windows or are possessed by evil spirits which give them added bounce. Whenever there is any sign of the action flagging, there will be a fresh burst of the theme song (“who you gonna call!”) on the soundtrack. THE INDEPENDENT