Not too far off, Nacho.
The Ghostbusters reboot is mostly disappointing. I have a feeling a lot of people will initially be apologists for it, particularly female critics glowing over it simply to defend the sisterhood. Eventually, though they'll recognize it for what it is, a cheap cash grab that played it way too safe, and got too many hands put in the cookie jar once the producers panicked over it after the first trailer. They "blanded" it.
Let me specifically note that the things wrong with this movie have nothing to do with the female cast. A bunch of dudes would have been just as hamstrung. They have to do with pacing, and being slavishly obedient to whatever the filmmakers perceived as the sacred nature of the original Ghostbusters. Like Star Trek & Star Wars, this mostly follows the same plot template as the original and does little else inspiring. I will say it starts off sort of strong and the end is pretty cool and fun, but the middle is just an unholy mess of disparate narrative threads and jokes that fall flat. By the time the third act coalesces into a whole, they've burned through all their good will.
Wiig and McCarthy do their best, but to steal a line from a review I read, "they're burdened with the weight of Ghostbusters." The movie's ultimate problem is that it's constantly reminding you that you're watching Ghostbusters. And the filmmakers want you to remember that Ghostbusters is this scared artifact that they have been entrusted with, and they're not going to do wrong by Ghostbusters, no-sir-ee, because Ghostbusters is great and awesome. And hey, did you know you're watching Ghostbusters, which is so special and great?
Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones are actually where the real comedy lies. McKinnon is consistently wacky and fun, and Jones has hands down the best line of the movie. (Which I won't ruin because it's the only time I laughed out loud.) Wiig would make a great action star and she really tries here, but this thing is so uneven that you never really fall into it. The unevenness has nothing to do with anything but the fact that you feel like they mangled this fucking thing in the edit.
The effects are fine. There's a couple pretty cool sequences. However there feels like they have very little connective tissue to each other. It's sort of a like a cover band performing the Ghostbusters greatest hits.
It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination. Bad would have meant they took real chances. It's almost painfully run-of-the mill, which is worse somehow.
