Gil Kenan brings the Spenglers to New York and then keeps interrupting them so the old team can wander through. Acaster, Nanjiani and a sewer chase earn their keep; the rest is a family film that keeps losing its family.
Gil Kenan directs from a script he wrote with Jason Reitman, and the plan is a reasonable one. Take the Spengler family from Ghostbusters: Afterlife, move them into the New York firehouse, let them do the job, and allow the surviving members of the 1984 team to turn up as neighbours rather than as the point. For its first twenty minutes that is the film we get. Then the visitors start arriving, and by halfway the family has been shown to the back of its own house.
The opening chase is the best thing here. A long, ribbed ghost that looks like a dragon assembled from sewer parts leads the Ecto-1 through Manhattan traffic, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) in the gunner’s seat and Gary (Paul Rudd) at the wheel. Eric Steelberg keeps the camera low and among the cars, and Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid cut it so that we always know where the ghost is, where the trap is and how far the car has to go. Nothing later moves as fast.
The comedy is in better hands than the story. Kumail Nanjiani plays Nadeem as a man who will sell anything and is affronted to learn that this time it mattered. James Acaster’s Lars, a researcher who talks about possessed objects the way a vet talks about worming, is funny every time he opens his mouth, and we laughed out loud at his deadpan more than we expected to. Rudd does his usual decent work as a man trying to be a stepfather without being allowed to use the word. Patton Oswalt’s one scene, in a library, is a pleasure.
The strand that gives the film a heart is Phoebe’s. Sent home from the team for being fifteen, she takes to playing chess in the park with Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), a girl who died in a fire long ago and has not left. Steelberg lights her in a cold blue that makes her look like a photograph, and Dario Marianelli’s score, which elsewhere waits politely for the old song, goes down to a few strings. We were moved by these scenes, more than we expected, because Grace plays loneliness plainly and Lind plays being dead as a kind of patience.
The rest is a crowd. Callie (Carrie Coon) is given a lecture to deliver and little else. Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) spends the film chasing a familiar green ghost around the attic. Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) and Podcast (Logan Kim) are handed jobs at a research facility and then left there. Dan Aykroyd gets a proper part, a Ray Stantz who is not ready to stop; Bill Murray gets a handful of scenes and reads them as if from a card. Orloff and Reid have six strands to keep alive and the film keeps going to whichever one has explaining to do. The demon’s history is told in the library and then told again in a laboratory, and we were bored the second time, then irritated, because the film had already done it well once.
Eve Stewart’s production design does what it can. The firehouse is cluttered and lived in, the containment unit glows red in the basement, and the research facility is white tile and glass tanks. Ruth Myers and Alexis Forte keep the flight suits tan and the packs heavy. The demon is a horned thing with a long face and a light in it, and Steelberg lets frost bloom across brick and windows as it passes. It is a good design. It is not frightening, and at 12A the film does not try to make it so.
The 1984 film was a workplace comedy about three unemployable men who turned out to be right. This one is a family film that keeps looking over its shoulder at them. Reitman’s Afterlife had the same habit and had a field to do it in; Kenan does it in a firehouse, and a firehouse is smaller.
Watch it at home with children who liked the last one. They will get the dragon and the ghosts, you will get Acaster and Rudd, and nobody will be frightened, which is the certificate doing its job and the film doing rather less.
