‘Overstimulation calms me...’
Do you know what wasn’t funny ten years ago? When something ‘random’ would happen in a movie and one of the characters would say ‘So… that just happened’. This exact thing takes place in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. A film released in 2021. This is indicative of how lazy and uninspired this film is…
Following the death of OG ghostbuster Egon Spengler, his daughter (Carrie Coon) and her two children, as played by Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace, inherit his ramshackle ‘dirt farm’ in the small town of Summerville. Upon arrival, the plot of the first Ghostbusters movie happens all over again but with no heart, style or character. Luckily, Paul Rudd shows up as an affable summer school teacher or this thing really would be irredeemable.
This is a film in which there is a character named Podcast who records everything on a portable microphone. It’s a film in which tiny, merchandisable Stay Puft Marshmellow Men spawn in a supermarket for no reason whatsoever. Perhaps most distressingly of all, this is also a film in which the ghost of Harold Ramis, rendered entirely in CGI, is clumsily brought back from the dead. It’s a tasteless, tactless gimmick that falls as flat as everything else in this movie. The real letdown here is how good this could have been. Coon is an amazing actress and teaming her up with Rudd should have been a home run. Instead, we spend most of the movie with the much less interesting younger cast members and when the original Ghostbusters do finally show up for the last 20 minutes, there is nothing left to salvage (as much as it did thrill me to see them back together in those uniforms).
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a shameless cash-in that sullies the memory of the original. It’s not funny. It’s not original. And if not for the cast working extremely hard to sell what is often clunky and unoriginal dialogue there would be nothing here to enjoy at all.
I’m not mad. I’m just really disappointed.