Watching this, you get the feeling that McKinnon, McCarthy, Wiig and Jones screened the original “Ghostbusters” over and over.
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I wanted to like the reboot of “Ghostbusters” – mainly so the misogynistic fanboys who got so hot and bothered about an all-female remake of the beloved 1984 original would look like fools. Feig’s “Ghostbusters” ain’t afraid of either.
Kate McKinnon, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and Leslie Jones star in the remake of the comedy classic “Ghostbusters”, opening this weekend at a theater near you.
So the structural problem that makes so many action comedies weak, the problem that crippled Pixels (2015) and made other big special-effects spectaculars so unfunny, is much too present here: The jokes do not come from characters, but from situations. This isn’t “Stripes” we’re talking about here. Murray’s wry sense of humor was a ideal counterbalance to Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis’ nerdy characters. The team, once assembled, is astonished at the sky-high rent required for the original’s firehouse and instead relocates to a Chinatown office above a takeout joint. The eponymous theme song, sung by Ray Parker Jr., shot to the top of the charts all around the world. That status is threatened when an old friend and writing partner, Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), releases a book they wrote together about ghosts. The bug-eyed, fizzy-haired McKinnon is like a blow torch of steampunk fire to the movie. He plays an incompetent, possibly stoned, assistant who, given his lack of secretarial skills, is probably smart to take the unconventional step of affixing a shirtless photo of himself to his resume. There are so many nods to the original film, Feig and company must be suffering from whiplash.
Murray, Ramis, et al excelled at finding laughs when nothing was happening, without seeming to be trying at all. “Suddenly to see it happen again under the Paul feig’s direction was just a great thrill”. We generate a lot of stuff, and I always want to have all the underpinnings of a big, emotional story. One gets the sense that the pitchforks are out.
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Here’s more about Feig’s fab four… It also stars Chris Hemsworth. In fact, once the team busts their first ghost, it feels like maybe 30 minutes of the plot have been cut out and we’re right near the end of the movie. McCarthy has been breaking new ground each and every time her films cross the $100 mark. It’s one of the best films of the year so far and no publicity is bad publicity.
