So great and yet so bad; a review in two parts.

The first half of this film is absolutely great.  I adored the two main kid characters, Podcast and Phoebe – this McKenna Grace actor is definitely one to watch!  She is phenomenal.  You might know her as Young Maddison from Malignant (2021), Young Tonya from I, Tonya (2017) or Young Carol from Captain Marvel (2019).  In this film she plays a wonderful geeky-girl character.  There are moments here where you could kinda see her as a childhood version of the glorious Holtzman from Ghostbusters (2016).  Her humour is deadpan and dry, she’s smart as all hell and she’s a great science-character.

And this entire new cast of characters is excellent.  I didn’t love her older brother but he works, and his love interest is pretty cool.  The mum is great with her science-allergies.  Paul Rudd is hilarious as the wild science teacher.  Science gets a great run here.  It’s funny, it’s fresh.

The basics of this story are shown in the trailer.  Broke family returns to dead grandpa’s dilapidated farmhouse.  Kids, and particularly Phoebe set about unpacking ghostly happenings and strange machinery – gramps was a bit of a tinkerer.  Now if you’re a rabid fan of Ghostbusters (1984) and Ghostbusters 2 (1989) you could be getting all frothy over a range of little inclusions here I’m sure.  I’m not.  I could tell the were “super fan service” because of the way the camera lingered on them.  

But by in large the kid characters here are far enough away from that reality that they’re discovering and interpreting this all themselves.  And that point of view made it fresh.  This is a new story, with a little help from their teacher who points them to some historic youtube footage for context.

Hooray!! We’re moving Ghostbusters into the 2020s with a balance of genders, great new characters and enough fan-service to presumably keep the precious childhoods intact.

J* gives the first half of this film 4 stars.

But woe.  It does not end there.  Sadness.  Anger.  Rant.  Spoilers.  SPOILERS!

The delightfully smart and endlessly qualified Phoebe, on recommendation of her slightly Ghostbusters fan-boi teacher, watches old footage of the original ghostwars.  Sure – gather info, get context, learn about dead grandpa’s contraptions.  Makes sense.  Then she watches an ad… and the ad suddenly escapes the confines of her computer and occupies the full screen.  Oh. No.  The old guys are back on the big screen.  Phoebe writes down this historic number.

There’s a bit of a discombobulation here with the way the story progresses.  It feels like it jumps forward a bit too fast, like the kids are forced to step up a bit un-naturally fast.  Some of their ghostbusting development feels rushed.  And then they end up in jail with their one call… the police guy says “who you gonna call” and it’s a funny clapback.  Then it isn’t.  Phoebe calls the original number.  Gets one of the original old guys.  

I get a sinking feeling.

And then we begin a downhill spiral of re-hash.  That whole Zuul thing.  The possession.  The characters that have to have sex.  The big hell-dogs.  The swirling ghost vortex whats-it.  All that same stuff from whichever of the old films it’s in.  It looks exactly the same.  And the kids know they have to sort this all out.

And the kids are great and they know what they’re doing and they’re the future and they can sort it out.

But no.

This film strips its climax from its own heroes.
It undermines all the capability and character development.
It destroys the future in favour of grasping at fan-boi straws.

Right when everything is at it’s most hectic do you know what happens?  A bunch of geriatric men show up.  Because despite everything we’ve seen, only the appearance of these “original” ghostbusters can apparently end this story.  And the script has been so witty and clever and done such a good job that I know they’re not idiot-writers and I know they could have written a great ending.  So this ending isn’t lazy scriptwriting… it’s a result of back-planning from a endpoint of pure fan-service.

The old guys look haggard.  They make some “original” jokes.  They make some “we’re old” jokes.  One of them is literally dead, both as an actor (Harold Ramis) and as a character (Grandpa Egon Spengler).  So he’s a ghost.  And that was cool in the first half of the movie – I’d even go as far as to say the ghost grandpa was cleverly done in the first half.  But not now.  

Oh no, we’re crossing the streams.  Again.  Whatever.

Then there are two end-credits.  Neither of them feature any of the new characters.  
This is bullshit.

The second half of this film isn’t Ghostbusters Afterlife.  It’s “Ghostbusters: Geriatrics Just Won’t Let Go.”

J* gives the secondish part of this film 1 star.

In the same way I won’t ignore whole films because one actor has some something dodgy, I can’t here ignore the whole film because of some outdated characters and a stupid ending.  The front end of this film is legitimately funny and fun and the characters are excellent.  And I have to give it an overall.

J* gives it 3 stars.

I quite like this review:
https://vanyaland.com/2021/11/19/ghostbusters-afterlife-review-bustin-aint-what-it-used-to-be/