Paul Feig’s reboot has four capable leads, one remarkable one and a script that keeps looking over its shoulder at 1984. The first hour is good, easy fun; the finale is twenty minutes of green light with the jokes switched off.
Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters had a job nobody would envy: remake a comedy people have quoted at each other since 1984 without copying it or insulting it. It arrived under a cloud of hostility that had nothing to do with anything on screen, and the plain answer to all of it is that the film is fine. It is a decent, good-natured comedy with four capable leads and one remarkable one, and a script by Feig and Katie Dippold that keeps checking whether the old film is still watching. It is funniest in the first hour, when the four women are alone in a lab with a new machine. The callbacks arrive in the second hour, and they slow it down.
The four are cast to a pattern, and the pattern mostly holds. Kristen Wiig’s Erin Gilbert is the nervous one, a physicist who wants tenure and would rather nobody mentioned the book about ghosts she wrote in her twenties. Melissa McCarthy’s Abby Yates is the believer who never stopped, still in the same lab with a running grievance about a takeaway that keeps short-changing her on wontons. Leslie Jones’s Patty Tolan, a subway worker who knows the history of every building in Manhattan, gets the best plain-spoken lines and delivers them as if she were the only adult present. All three are good, and Jones gets a laugh from nearly every line she is given.
The film belongs to Kate McKinnon. Her Jillian Holtzmann is the engineer, goggles up, hair up, dancing to DeBarge with a blowtorch in each hand, and she plays every scene as if she has received different instructions from everyone else and is enjoying them more. Whenever the plot needs a gadget, Holtzmann has built it. The scene where she lays the new weapons out on a table and talks the others through them is the funniest in the film.
Chris Hemsworth’s Kevin, the receptionist hired for his looks and kept on despite everything else, is the other thing that works. He wears glasses with no lenses so he need not clean them, covers his eyes when the phone rings so he cannot hear it, and cannot be trusted with a message. We laughed at him more than we expected to, and slightly more than felt dignified. It is one joke told twenty ways, and Hemsworth plays every one of them straight.
The look is better than a film like this needs. Robert Yeoman shoots New York at night in deep blues so that the ghosts, lit from inside in electric greens and turquoise, look like neon that has come loose from the shopfronts. Jefferson Sage gives the team an upstairs room over a restaurant, cluttered with copper and hand-lettered warnings, a nicer place to spend time than the firehouse they cannot afford. Jeffrey Kurland’s jumpsuits are orange-striped and slightly too big, so the women look as if they have borrowed them from a roadworks crew. Theodore Shapiro’s score does what it must and steps aside when the old tune arrives.
The trouble is the second half, and it is two troubles. The first is deference. The original cast turn up one after another in small parts, each stopping the film for an applause break, and the firehouse, the slime, the car and the logo are all wheeled on and pointed at. Neil Casey’s Rowan North, a janitor planting devices around the city to thin the wall between the living and the dead, has a grievance and no line worth remembering. The second trouble is the climax, in Times Square: twenty minutes of green light, streams of it, columns of it, and not one joke we can recall. We were not bored, exactly; we were waiting. Melissa Bretherton and Brent White cut the first hour with good comic timing and the last quarter as a straight action film, with the jokes trimmed for pace.
Set against Feig’s own films the pattern is familiar. Bridesmaids (2011) and Spy (2015) both let their casts run and trusted the plot to catch up; this one has to serve a franchise as well as a cast, and the franchise wins. It is still a pleasant evening if you like the people in it. Go for McKinnon and Hemsworth and forgive the finale. It runs 117 minutes and carries a 12A.
