Ivan Reitman’s sequel runs the first film again with the volume turned down and a baby in the pram. It is amiable, occasionally funny and never once necessary; Peter MacNicol’s possessed curator is the one thing in it that is new.
Five years after the first film, the Ghostbusters are out of work. New York sued them for the damage they did saving it, a court has barred them from the trade, and Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) hosts a cable programme called World of the Psychic. Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) does children’s parties with Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson). Ivan Reitman directs again, Aykroyd and Harold Ramis write again, and what they have written is the first film with the names changed: a woman in danger, a possessed building, an official who does not believe them, a giant thing in the last reel. It is agreeable company for 108 minutes and there is no reason for it to exist.
The one new idea is good and the film hardly uses it. Under First Avenue runs a river of pink slime that feeds on the city’s bad temper. There is one good scene, Stantz and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) drilling through the road at night and finding the stuff below them, and then the script moves on. Mostly the slime is a device to find a body for Vigo the Carpathian, a tyrant living inside a portrait at the Manhattan Museum of Art, who needs a living child to come back through. The child is the baby son of Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver), whose pram sets off down the street on its own in the opening minutes.
Peter MacNicol is the reason to watch. Janosz Poha, Dana’s boss at the museum, is a timid man with an accent from nowhere who falls under the painting’s influence and delivers its orders with the dignity of a waiter announcing the specials. MacNicol never winks, and we laughed at nearly every line he has, several of which are not jokes. Murray has decided that the funniest thing he can do is look as though he would rather be elsewhere, and about half the time he is right.
He and Weaver have been handed a romance to repair, and it does not repair. He turns up at her flat, holds her baby and says sorry, and the script wants us to forgive a man who has not called in years. Weaver plays it honestly and looks as if she is in a better film about a single mother. Rick Moranis’s Louis Tully defends the team in court with a short speech that is the best writing in the picture. Harris Yulin’s judge, promising them a sentence he has not yet invented, is the only other performer who has understood what kind of film this is.
The craft is solid and rather anonymous. Michael Chapman lights this New York like a department store at Christmas, and the night streets show none of the grime the slime is supposed to be feeding on. Bo Welch, fresh from Beetlejuice, does better: the restoration room is a long white gallery with Vigo’s portrait at the end of it like an altar, and the courtroom is oak panelling and green lamps. Randy Edelman’s score is chirpy and thin, and it tells us to be excited at moments when the first film would have let Murray mutter. Sheldon Kahn and Donn Cambern cut it briskly, but the middle hour drifts while the story waits for the finale.
There is one honest fright. Dana runs a bath for the baby, turns her back, and the pink stuff rises out of the tub and reaches for him, and we jumped, at home, with the lights on. It is the only moment the film remembers that the first one was a horror film. It lasts a minute and is followed by a joke.
Ghostbusters (1984) was made by people who seemed startled to be getting away with it. This one is made by people who know exactly what they got away with and have come back to do it again, more carefully and for a younger crowd; it carries a PG and the slime is never more frightening than an eight-year-old can stand. For a family with a child that age it is a fair evening. Anyone older will spend a good deal of it waiting for MacNicol to come back.
