I know some of you might like the film but good grief this was garbage.
New generation family Ghostbusters unit chase a dragon round the streets of New York, cheerfully letting one of the children get projected out of the buster’s ambulance, firing the photon gun while being side-swiped by oncoming traffic. Dad, Paul Rudd, finds it amusing when the Hell’s Kitchen Sewer Dragon smashes several moving cars up by hurling manhole covers round like frisbees. It’s like he is entertained by seeing people nearly maimed or killed.
The family are told off by the mayor for allowing unpaid child labour to work in such a dangerous task and gets treated as if he is being unreasonable for this. He’s right!
Dan Ackroyd runs a radio podcast show where folk bring in what they suspect or home to contain the ghosts of beloved dead relatives for a kind of Antiques Roadshow evaluation. When an old lady brings in an artifact she hopes contains her late husband, Ackroyd finds no trace of him and smashes the object to pieces, a pointless rather callous destruction of a woman’s priceless memento. He is then introduced to the film’s main McGuffin, a Faberge egg like sphere containing a powerful ghost controlling demon able to freeze people in frozen Day After Tomorrow’s ice age kind of way so they are frozen to death (as seen in the prologue) but defeatable by a Last Airbender style fire-wielding hero called The Fire Master. When the chap who sold Ackroyd the sphere proves capable of making fire do his bidding, it is blindingly obvious he will use this skill to beat the ice-demon-God.
Bill Murrey turns up but says and does nothing of any value. Similarly, one of the family sons gets slimed by the franchise’s best known ghost and then has virtually nothing to do for the rest of the film.
There are few jokes, many of the cast just look bored, especially the family mother. McKenna Grace’s Phoebe is the strongest character but she is utterly unconvincing. She also does some really stupid things. Much of her plot arc is that she develops a near lesbian crush-bond with the ghost of a girl who burnt to death. To relate closer to her, after just a few short meetings, Phoebe allows herself an artificial death so she can out of body experience only to be temporarily possessed and let loose the main villain as her friend betrays her only to redeem herself later on after the evil entity inexplicably lets her get her life back again.
Too many characters used interchangeably, scenes that could be shuffled into any order, lack of jokes. The exact way the ending will play out is spelt out many times as the film progresses. Many obvious nods are made to the excellent first film, notably a ghost running amok in a library scaring the librarians tick-boxes the opening scene of the first movie. Shambolic.
Photos taken by me.
Arthur Chappell
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