Noiseless Chatter

I ended the last review promising to discuss the most idiotic controversy in modern history. By that I mean there is no “correct” side by any stretch of the imagination. Whoever you align yourself with, you’re aligning yourself with a pack of idiots saying idiotic things for idiotic reasons. More ink has been spilled on 2016’s Ghostbusters than has been spilled on most films, and only a small fraction of that ink has been used to say anything remotely intelligent.

Sometimes I find it useful to provide a history lesson in these features. This time around, it probably would be…but I don’t know that I can stomach doing so. It’s a tiresome situation that should collectively embarrass us all to think back on.

So, hey, forgive me if I’m just hitting the highlights here. God knows you can read enough horseshit about this movie elsewhere; my own pile doesn’t need to be that big.

For the sake of ease and readability, I’m going to refer to this film as Ghostbusters ’16. Because I have to. Because I’ll have a lot to say about this movie in relation to the one it reboots and/or remakes, which has exactly the same title. Right. Now that we’ve gotten the only rational thing to say about this movie out of the way, let’s dive in.

I don’t remember when I started hearing proper rumors of Ghostbusters 3. I know it was well before the 2009 video game came out, as Dan Aykroyd referred to that at the time as the closest thing we were going to get to a third film.

And that was okay. The game wasn’t too great (it was far more of an interactive movie than it was anything that allowed much expression or experimentation), but the fact that Aykroyd and Harold Ramis helped write it lent it an air of legitimacy. What’s more, nearly all of the main cast members voiced their characters. Notably missing were Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis, but all four Ghostbusters were played by the same actors, Annie Potts voiced Janine, William Atherton played a returning Walter Peck, and Max von Sydow, who voiced Vigo in the second film, brought the Carpathian back to life once more.

So, fine. I wish the game were great and worth replaying (or any fun whatsoever), but really the main duty it fulfilled, so far as I was concerned, is that it was the final nail in the coffin of Ghostbusters 3. Elements of Aykroyd’s script for a third film even made it into the game, but I personally can’t give any indication as to how true it was to his vision.

And I like that the game killed Ghostbusters 3. I like that because I didn’t want Ghostbusters 3.

Whenever those rumors were circulating — around 2005, let’s say — the idea was already that Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Aykroyd, and Ramis were too old to play their parts. The aging Ghostbusters would take on younger apprentices, who would then lead the franchise forward on their own.

This didn’t sound especially appealing. After a masterpiece and a good film — and a fondly remembered cartoon with a stellar voice cast — was it really worth a late-game third installment just to wave goodbye?

The original Ghostbusters was the textbook illustration of lightning in a bottle. Indeed, to continue with metaphors of electrostatic discharge, the second film proved that lightning wasn’t going to strike twice.

I didn’t really want a third movie. Not for the sake of passing a torch nobody was asking to be passed. Not for the sake of rubbing our faces in how old and fat and bald the actors were now just to joke about it.

In other words, when the prospect of Ghostbusters 3 was realistically floated, starring the original cast, written by the original scribes, and taking place in the same universe, I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want it. I was glad that the project died. So was Bill Murray, who was so reluctant to sign up for the project that Aykroyd toyed with the idea of killing off Venkman.

What a great movie this could have been! The best character is dead and we get to watch the others slowly die. What a treat!

I’m saying all of this to make clear that when I tell you I wasn’t excited about Ghostbusters ’16, it wasn’t due to sexism or gatekeeping or anything to that effect. Faced with the prospect of a third film by the original crew, I said, “No, thank you.” It shouldn’t be at all surprising or controversial, then, that I also turned down a cheaper, less interesting substitute.

Ghostbusters 3 was dead. The video game gave us our canonical third story, and nobody was asking for anything more.

Nobody except, of course, Columbia Pictures, which twenty-odd years after the release of the first film for some reason still liked money. More scripts for a potential Ghostbusters 3 were written, rewritten, punched up, and discarded. New writers were brought on and let go repeatedly. Bill Murray made it clear he wasn’t interested. That stopped nothing. Harold Ramis died in 2014. That finally did.

The creative team was faced with the prospect of having only two of the original Ghostbusters on board, and one of them was Winston. The project was canned, finally, for good.

Kind of.

That same year, it was decided that the third Ghostbusters film would be a reboot/remake. If you’re wondering why I’m using both of those terms, it’s complicated. I say “reboot” because it was intended to serve as the first film of a new series under the Ghostbusters banner. (The cast signed contracts committing them for three films.) I say “remake” because Ghostbusters ’16 claims in its own credits that it’s based on the original Ghostbusters. And, frankly, the confusion about what the fuck this movie even is carries right on through the experience of watching it.

But we’ll get to that.

There were plenty of Ghostbusters fans who were already disinterested in the project. I was absolutely one of them. Maybe it would be for somebody else what the original film was for me. That would indeed be fantastic, but I wasn’t holding my breath. As a point of comparison, I wasn’t interested in Pee-wee’s third movie, either, and I waited a long time to even give that a shot, equally convinced it would be a disappointing return. This was nothing personal; I’m just rarely keen on modern cash-ins on old properties.

The true backlash to Ghostbusters ’16 didn’t come until we started getting details, though. It would be directed by Paul Feig, whose recent film Bridesmaids had been a major hit. Coincidentally enough, that film had a very similar financial return to the original Ghostbusters. Bridesmaids cost $32.5 million and made $288.4 million; Ghostbusters cost $30 million and made $295.2 million. In terms of raw figures, they’re damned near equal.

The problem wasn’t that Bridesmaids was a bad film or that Feig was a bad director; the movie was massively popular and a critical success. The problem was that the style of humor in Bridesmaids was almost diametrically opposite the style of humor we’d expect from Ghostbusters. Feig did not feel like a natural fit for the material. But, hey, so far, who cares?

People cared the moment it became clear that Ghostbusters ’16 would have an all-female cast.

Feig cast his frequent star Melissa McCarthy as well as Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones from Saturday Night Live to serve as his team of paranormal investigators. My level of disinterest remained the same. I came very quickly to feel as though that put me in the minority.

The backlash to this casting was swift, fierce, and appalling.

While there were unquestionably plenty of Ghostbusters fans who simply weren’t interested in another film — perhaps they disliked Feig, perhaps they wanted the original cast, perhaps they outgrew the franchise — the overall tone of resistance came from a place of overt, clear misogyny.

I’m certainly willing to believe that actual misogynists were in the minority. In fact, that’s what I deeply hope is the case. But their voices were loudest, strongest, and more sensational (therefore more media friendly) than whatever tepid criticisms might have been levied by more even-keeled individuals.

Hate spread and festered in the usual hotbeds. Reddit. 4chan. Breitbart. I will not repeat the kinds of things that were said. You are free to look them up. If you’d prefer to imagine them, know that they’re worse than whatever’s already in your mind.

Deliberate, organized assaults were made against the film’s YouTube trailers and IMDB page to artificially tank its ranking. The director and actors were trolled and threatened constantly online, to the point that the eventual movie attempted to capture this as a series of meta jokes. Reality was no joke, though, as Leslie Jones certainly knew. As the female Ghostbuster who was also black, she was specifically targeted, with her accounts hacked, her personal information circulated, and nude photos of her leaked.

The response and behavior on the side of the film’s detractors was abhorrent.

Then, of course, you had the defenders.

By sheer virtue of taking sides, defenders legitimized the detractors. Oh, so the detractors gave the trailer one star? I’ll give it five. The detractors won’t go see it in theaters? I’ll go twice. What I still believe was a vocal minority spat venom at a film they hadn’t seen, but it was no better to see the other side heaping praise upon a film they also hadn’t seen.

Granted, if I had to go to dinner with one of these groups of people I think you can guess which I’d choose. But, y’know, maybe we could all just let a movie be a fucking movie and not worry that you can’t see it or that you have to see it based on the fact that there are women on the god damned poster.

I remember a friend of mine, whose opinion I normally value, saying that he was going to see it as many times as he could in theaters, just to spite people. (And he probably did. He’s the kind of person who exclusively follows through on meaningless gestures.) Bear in mind, the film wasn’t even out yet. He committed to seeing a film multiple times before he had any idea whether or not he’d like it. For a personal comparison here, Wes Anderson is far and away my favorite director. Isle of Dogs, his latest film, is in theaters as I write this. History suggests that I’ll watch it multiple times, but I’m sure as shit not going to commit to that. What if it’s terrible? Yes, I’d like to support Anderson, but why on God’s green Earth would I repeatedly trade my money and time for something I don’t even like? Who would that possibly benefit?

Granted, blindly forcing yourself to enjoy something is exponentially better behavior than hacking and leaking celebrity nudes, but that bar isn’t very high in itself. And as a critic — and a writer, and a not-a-moron — I can’t possibly respect somebody who forces themselves to have a positive opinion of a work of art any more than I can respect somebody who forces themselves to have a negative one.

“I’m going to see it because there are women in it” is exactly as constructive a mindset as “I’m not going to see it because there are women in it.”

I didn’t see Ghostbusters ’16 in theaters. Part of me did want to see it, just to know if it managed to live either up or down to expectations, but for much of its release, I was in Germany. I could have seen it when I got back, but I had better things to do than to rush out and spend $20 on a movie I never wanted to see in the first place.

So I didn’t watch it. Until now. Until I started this series.

And, honestly, I’m glad that’s what happened. Because it means I get to experience it removed from both sides of that idiotically vocal response. I’m no longer a sexist if I dislike it, nor am I a feminist champion if I do like it.

I just get to watch a fucking movie.

I just get to laugh at some fucking jokes.

I just get to enjoy it or not enjoy it according to my own personal fucking preferences, and I don’t have to worry that half the fucking planet will tear me down wherever I land.

And now I’ve seen it.

And holy hell is Ghostbusters ’16 a pile of garbage.

This has nothing to do with whatever dumbass “women can’t be funny” mentality is at the root of so many criticisms. They can. It’s moronic to suggest otherwise, as though “humor” were some point of biological difference between the sexes.

It isn’t, and to prove it, we need look no further than the breeding ground for many Ghostbusters cast members throughout the three films: Saturday Night Live.

That show — over the course of its admittedly long tenure — has given us Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Joan Cusack, Nora Dunn, Jan Hooks, Sarah Silverman, Cheri Oteri, Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and a hell of a lot more. I’m listing only the ones that stood out to me, personally, as a viewer. Your list may be longer. Your list may even consist entirely of different funny women, just as our lists of favorite Saturday Night Live men would probably differ.

That’s because Saturday Night Live has often done a great job of providing its women with a similar visibility to what it provides its men. I wish I could say “always” instead of “often” and “the same” instead of “similar,” but we have to take what we can get. Part of this is due to the nature of the show, of course; women in real life make news, so they need a cadre of females in the cast to play them. And, much of the time, that’s what Saturday Night Live seems to view its female cast members as: a logistical necessity.

In the early 2000s, though, that began to change. Tina Fey joined the cast in Season 26, Amy Poehler joined in Season 27, and gradually, perfectly, naturally, the show began spotlighting its massive female talent in a way it never truly had before. This may certainly have something to do with Fey taking the reins as head writer, but I think it’s safe to say that it had more to do with the sheer volume of talented females the show now had at once. It says something that such sketch comedy naturals as Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, Fred Armisen, Will Forte, and Chris Parnell were commonly relegated to supporting roles and utilitarian impersonations. You know. The kind of material many female cast members had been given in the past.

And so the stage was set for Ghostbusters ’16 to draw from Saturday Night Live, just as the original film had. That’s a good thing. Wiig, McKinnon, and Jones are funny people. They have a tremendous amount of talent. Period.

You may not enjoy their particular talents, and that’s fine. I’m by no means a guy that will tell you all comedy must be appreciated. But these actors know what they’re good at, and, in the right hands, within the right contexts, they are unquestionably funny enough to carry a full-length comedy film.

Just…not this one.

As nitpicky as it may sound, the biggest problem with Ghostbusters ’16 is its title. Had it been called anything else, it wouldn’t have brought with it a mountain of what turned out to be unreachable expectations. It would have been a movie that audiences could anticipate, engage with, and remember on its own merits.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it would have been a better film. In fact, I’m pretty damned sure it wouldn’t have been. But it would at least be a film that was free of controversy, ire, and stigma. It would prevent it from inviting active, inevitable comparison with the beloved — and genuinely fantastic — original.

It handed itself a legacy that the original had to earn. That is always unlikely to end well.

Ghostbusters ’16 does itself no favors by feeling messy, aimless, and incompetent by turns. Wiig, McKinnon, McCarthy, and Jones all do their best to make the film entertaining, but there’s a pervasive lack of focus that prevents anything from actually sticking together.

A funny movie isn’t funny just because the people in it try to do funny things. Funny movies are funny because they’re sharply written. Because they’re carefully paced. Because anything that distracts from the joke it’s trying to make is left on the cutting room floor. Because it knows when to quit.

None of that applies to Ghostbusters ’16. Not even slightly. Part of me even wonders if there was a script. Was this shot like Curb Your Enthusiasm, with Feig telling the actors the two or three things that needed to happen in each scene and leaving the rest up to chance?

The lack of focus and confusion about what the movie is really shouldn’t be a factor here. After all, it’s about another team of Ghostbusters coming together, starting a business, and fighting some supernatural evil. As the first movie proved, you don’t need to have much focus at all; touch on the important bits, make some great jokes, and give us characters worth spending time with.

The original Ghostbusters worked because, as I stated in that review, the characters interacted in identifiable ways. With the exception of Winston, who joins the team later, these are three men who have known each other and worked together for quite some time. They know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. They know who to rely on at which time. They know how to handle each other. They know how to both accomplish things and enjoy the time they spend together.

You know. Like colleagues. And also like friends.

The four Ghostbusters in this movie, by contrast, don’t even seem to like each other.

They say they do, don’t get me wrong, but I never felt it. One of them tells a joke, the next one tells a joke, the third one tells a joke, the last one tells a joke. That’s not interaction; that’s four characters reciting their lines. We’re expressly told that two of these characters have a history, but never once does the film feel compelled to make us believe it.

Part of the reason this doesn’t work is that the characters are never defined to begin with. It’s difficult to invest in a relationship without knowing who either party is even meant to be.

Again, let’s dive back into my review of the first film. Egon was the brains, Ray was the heart, Peter was the swagger, and Winston was the hired gun. For two films and a cartoon series, those descriptions were the cores of each character, and they easily defined both their roles on the team and their roles in the film.

Now let’s try to break down the characters in Ghostbusters ’16 in a similar way.

Who is the brains? Well, that’s an easy one. It’s obviously Holtzmann, played by Kate McKinnon. She develops and builds the team’s equipment, after all, and seems to perform the majority of the experiments, so, there. Simple.

Except that McCarthy’s character Abby seems to know the most about what’s actually going on and has the responsibility of expositing it at regular intervals, so maybe she’s the brains of the operation. She also started investigating paranormal activity before the team even existed, which reinforces that idea. Okay. So maybe she’s the brains. Or she’s also the brains.

But then there’s Wiig as Erin, a respected professor at Columbia on the verge of earning her tenure. She also assisted Abby in writing a book about the supernatural, which kicks the entire plot into gear. What’s more, she serves as a skeptic who demands evidence and refuses to believe anything blindly, which is certainly a mark of intelligence whether or not skepticism leads her in the right direction so, okay, she’s the brains, too. Three of them are the brains.

…but Jones plays Patty who is explicitly hired onto the team because of her deep and extensive knowledge of New York City’s history, which allows the Ghostbusters to piece together the clues that will explain what is happening meaning all four of them are the brains and…

Ugh. Okay. Maybe we shouldn’t have started with brains. Bad example, right?

Let’s move onto the heart. Who on the team is the impulsive one who dives headlong into things without fully thinking them through, but who ultimately means well?

That’s clearly Abby, who published an old manuscript without considering what impact it might have on the career of her coauthor and dove excitedly into paranormal investigation without any of the proper equipment, experience, or ability to protect herself. Easy.

Except that Patty qualifies as well, readily launching into loud tirades at passers by, finagling herself a spot on the team without actually knowing who the Ghostbusters are or what they do, and borrowing her uncle’s hearse without consideration for the damage it may sustain before he needs it back. Okay. So that’s two of them sharing that role.

…but really it’s three of them, because Wiig confusingly sheds her professional demeanor almost as soon as she links back up with Abby and becomes a totally different character, fawning moronically over their new secretary and freeing a dangerous ghost just for the sake of proving a nebulous point to somebody she’d never met before.

Oh, and, whoops, actually it’s Holtzmann, too, who gets so caught up in an impromptu dance routine that she starts a fire and then hesitates to put it out, and who sings for some reason when their receptionist is in mortal danger, and who licks the equipment and who puts her feet up on the mayor’s desk and who and who and who.

You get the picture. There are also clear examples of each of them acting the part of the swagger, and of each of them acting the part of the hired gun. I’ll spare you another few hundred words with the assurance that watching the film with this in mind will make it abundantly clear that every one of these characters plays every one of these roles at once.

And then…well…what’s the point? Ramis in the original film demonstrated not only the importance of having a great straight man, but of the appeal of having one. He was my favorite character as a kid, and it isn’t because he made me laugh the most. It’s because I understood who he was. On some level, sure, I identified with the guy, but largely it was his role in the film that I appreciated most. He’s who I wanted to be on the schoolyard.

Others, of course, wanted to be Peter. My brother, I remember well, always wanted to be Ray. And there were little Winstons and Janines out there as well. In some cases, the casting was logistical. In other cases, it was because we knew who these characters were, we knew how they’d act and react in certain situations (as well as with each other), and we knew what we enjoyed about them.

Of these four new characters, who would I have been? Who would anybody be? They’re each always everything. We don’t have four characters to choose from, we have an omnicharacter operating four mouths.

This is a crisis of comedy. They can’t all deliver the same kinds of jokes, and yet they do. “Do-Re-Egon” works only because of Egon’s character. “The flowers are still standing” works only because of Peter’s. “No offense, guys, but I gotta get my own lawyer” works only because of Winston’s. “You’ve got to try this pole!” works only because of Ray’s.

Across the previous two films, I’d have a very long list of jokes that are specific to the characters, and a very short list of those that are interchangeable. In Ghostbusters ’16, I can’t think of a single joke that could only have been made by one character.

And that’s because they aren’t characters. They’re funny women who are being crammed into a format without any regard for their specific talents or potential for characterization. They’re all the same vague all-purpose comedybot with traits and motivations that shift from scene to scene and from line to line so that they can all draw from the same pool of gags. The characters don’t gibe; they jostle.

There’s not a single natural fit in the movie because the actors aren’t allowed to behave naturally.

Never is this more evident than when anybody tries to deliver the kind of specialized technobabble (paranormobabble?) that Ramis and Aykroyd deployed regularly in the first two films. Listen to Abby say something like “a full-torso transmogrification with corporeal aggression,” and it’s impossible to see anything but McCarthy struggling through a line she can’t imagine anyone would ever say, let alone her own character. She delivers it and many others the same way I try to work mucus up out of my throat when I’m feeling congested. Egon and Ray speak this way because that’s who they are. Abby speaks this way because the script says she has to.

There’s also a really weird and out-of-place reliance on pop-culture references. The other two films may have mentioned Twinkies and Slinkies and Parcheesi, but I don’t think there were many moments that expected you to laugh just because you recognized the name of something.

Ghostbusters ’16, by contrast, has a scene in which the characters completely demolish the flow of the narrative so that they can list Patrick Swayze movies to each other. Not because it has any bearing on anything that’s happening, sheds light on anything that will happen, or relates to the film itself in any larger way, but rather because people might hear the titles Road House and Point Break and chuckle faintly with recognition, I guess. Surely that isn’t worth derailing your own movie, but what do I know.

Then there’s a pointless exchange about the mayor from Jaws, a character reciting the one line from Scarface that all shitty comedies feel legally obligated to recite, ghosts referred to as Casper, characters visiting Reddit, YouTube, and Amazon, people talking about emojis, Patty reenacting Oprah’s “you get a car” bit, Holtzmann singing tunes from The Wizard of Oz, Abby doing an Exorcist impression…it’s just too much.

Ghostbusters stands up today in large part because it doesn’t feel of its time. An audience coming to it now does not need a particular frame of reference to enjoy or understand it. Here, even if these jokes were funny, they rely on the audience recognizing things that either will be forgotten in a few years or that are, quite simply, far superior productions.

Speaking of far superior productions, Ghostbusters ’16 can’t seem to stop itself from referencing the original films. I’m not referring to the general concept or the ghost-busting equipment or anything like that; I’m referring to specific lines and callbacks that only serve to remind the audience that they’re watching a notably lesser shadow of those movies instead of the real thing.

In the original film, Janine answered the phone by saying, “Ghostbusters, what do you want?” because that’s who she was and what she would say when she was in that particular mood. Here, Chris Hemsworth’s character says it on an answering machine because it’s a line from the other movie.

In the original film, the Ghostbusters rant to the mayor and his staff, getting louder and more desperate as they appeal to him to cooperate. Each character delivers a dire warning of what to expect if Gozer isn’t stopped, culminating in Peter floundering with, “Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!” It was true to his character, the context, and the building rhythm and tension of the scene. Here, two characters say “mass hysteria” to each other because it’s a line from the other movie.

In the original film, Egon uses a Twinkie as a relatable metaphor so that Ray and Winston can understand the amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. In Ghostbusters ’16, a billboard says “That’s a big Twinkie,” because it’s a line from the other movie. And which also makes no sense in this new context because “big Twinkies” don’t exist. They’re all the same size.

That already seems like a lot of unnecessary callbacks, stripped of their humor and appeal because they’re used in a way that shows no regard for what made them funny in the first place, but there are at least a dozen more throughout Ghostbusters ’16, none of them funnier than these. And that’s without counting all of the cameos.

So, hey! Let’s talk about the cameos.

The cameos are pointless but, like the callbacks, they at least remind us that if we ever feel compelled to watch this horse shit again, we can pop in a much better movie instead.

All of the main actors from the first two films return in some capacity, barring Rick Moranis, who retired from acting almost 20 years earlier. Annie Potts plays a receptionist again, because, hey, girl power, right? Sigourney Weaver plays Holtzmann’s mentor. Ernie Hudson plays Patty’s uncle. Dan Aykroyd plays a cab driver. They all get about as much to do as the bust of Harold Ramis, which sits in a hallway.

The only cameo that gets any room to stretch his legs is Bill Murray, appearing in a whopping two scenes.

Murray is probably the highlight of the film, and even he couldn’t make me laugh. He plays Dr. Martin Heiss, “a famed debunker of the paranormal.” He says “hell no” on a news broadcast and if you bother paying Bill Murray to appear in your movie and deliver a joke, it really should be something better than that.

Later he shows up at the Ghostbusters’ office and asks to see the ghost they caught. Fair enough. This makes sense within the context of the film and in terms of what little we know about their characters. (That is to say, their jobs.) Against the extreme cautioning of her colleagues, Erin releases the ghost from the trap, and it immediately murders Dr. Heiss.

Funny shit!

But, whatever, who cares. Bill Murray got paid to sit on a chair and a stuntman got paid to fall out of a window. What makes this moment interesting, though, is the instructive contrast it offers to the original films.

Because, y’know, the first group of Ghostbusters didn’t go around killing people.

Granted, yes, it’s accidental. But it’s an accident born of gross negligence. The ghost they release is one that took them an extremely long time to capture. (I know. I watched the scene and it felt like an eternity.) It was difficult. Trapping it came only after a lot of damage was caused and one of their teammates was even held in its claws.

Dr. Heiss is in his mid-60s, at least. He walks with a cane. He’s so frail he can’t even stand up for extended periods. And when Erin releases the ghost, she knowingly and deliberately does so when the rest of her team isn’t ready. To be clear: Erin unleashes a powerful ghost on an elderly man, actively preventing anyone from being prepared to handle it.

This is murder. Or, I guess, manslaughter. Either way, it’s homicide.

This is William S. Burroughs killing his wife while drunkenly trying to shoot an apple off her head. No, the intention in either case was not to harm anybody. But, in both cases, the setup was willfully constructed in a way that death is as good as a given.

Dr. Heiss is killed by the ghost and his corpse is ejected from the building. (Or he dies from the fall after being shoved out by the ghost. It’s academic at this point.) The ghost flies away to kill dozens or hundreds more people and nobody even tries chasing it.

The police come and the Ghostbusters are questioned. This isn’t very productive, because the Ghostbusters can hardly speak. They are overcome with remorse. Erin can’t believe her grandstanding directly led to the death of an innocent man.

The rest of the Ghostbusters start to question the wisdom of what they’re doing. Don’t they exist to help and protect people? Aren’t they now responsible for taking a life? If they didn’t exist, Dr. Heiss would still be alive. How many others will die as they bumble around the city with barely tested equipment? The Ghostbusters are speechless.

Oh, whoops, no, this is the part where they list Patrick Swayze movies to each other. Fuck the dead guy, right?

Compare this to the scene in which the original batch of Ghostbusters almost shoot the maid in the first film. An important distinction is the fact that what they do is totally accidental. Nobody, for instance, is trying to prove to the maid that the proton pack is real. They simply get spooked and fire at her cart.

They’re sorry. In fact, all three of them apologize. They take a moment to calm down. That was a close one. They’re here to catch a ghost, but they can’t let that get to them. If they do, as they’ve just learned, they are endangering the lives of the staff and guests. As a direct response to this moment, they change their tactics and split up. Why? Because they’d prefer not to murder innocent people.

How does the new team stack up? Well, in response to directly causing the death of an innocent man, they recite Swayze’s IMDB page.

Can callous response to death be funny? Of course. But is that part of who these characters are, or is it just another example of Feig (and his cowriter Katie Dippold) cramming in jokes for the sake of having them without regard for where they are in the film, what they mean, or what they’ll say about the characters?

Of course, that’s a rhetorical question. No thought is given to the characters elsewhere in the film, and Feig sure as hell isn’t about to start now.

I’m blaming Feig, but I can’t say for sure that it’s his fault. At the very least, though, he’s guilty for not reining his actors in, and not letting them know that every scene can’t play like it stars a gaggle of honking geese.

These characters never shut up. They’re exaggerated. They think going big is the only way to get a laugh, despite the fact that the previous two films rarely resorted to that. They think acting like cartoon characters — all bug-eyes and gesticulations and shouts — is the best way to sell the material, when all it does is make the movie even more tiresome.

This even affects the supporting characters, who each have their own unnecessary quirks and punchlines, further undercutting any sense of reality Ghostbusters ’16 could have possibly established.

Remember the librarian in the first film? Her equivalent here shits himself and tells jokes about animal enslavement and the repression of New York’s early Irish. Remember the hotel manager trying to keep his guests from knowing what the Ghostbusters were doing in the first film? Remember the way we’d cut from the Ghostbusters wrecking the ballroom to him in a state of escalating panic? His equivalent here has a high-pitched scream, which is not quite as worth cutting away to, in my humble opinion, and which says nothing about who he is, his role in the film, or anything that’s actually happening.

What Ghostbusters ’16 does best is shine a light on why the original film wouldn’t have worked as well with any other approach. If the first film takes itself seriously, this one refuses to. If the first film had strong characterization, this one relies entirely on gags to keep things moving. If the first film took place against a recognizable, realistic version of New York City, this one takes place in Wacky Land, where every character, no matter how minor, gets a chance to tell a few jokes and make funny faces and remind you that you’re watching a gigantic heap of shit.

It also proves, time and again, that the reason Ghostbusters ’16 fails has nothing to do with the gender of its stars; it fails because of its basic comic philosophy. (This obviously does not excuse those who wrote it off the moment they heard about the film, of course. Their apoplexy has and had nothing to do with the actual quality of the film.)

When Erin meets up with Abby and Holtzmann the first time, they make her listen to a recording of a fart. (“Is it more or less disgusting if I tell you it came from the front?” asks Holtzmann, and it’s a perfect opportunity to eject the disc before wasting another hour and a half of your day.) This is an early, establishing joke. This occurs while the film is still telling the audience what to expect. This is the foundation upon which the rest of the film will build.

Now please list for me every time the first two movies resorted to a fart joke.

Boy, that was easy, huh?

Would the original films have been improved by the addition of fart jokes? This movie sees the Ghostbusters shooting a big ghost in his genitals. Would the original film have been improved if those Ghostbusters stood around slugging the Marshmallow Man in the balls? This movie sees Erin complaining that slime got inside “every crack.” Would the original film have been improved if Peter told Ray that slime got in his dick hole?

It’s nothing to do with gender. It’s everything to do with the original film being intelligently crafted at all levels, and this one positively leaping for the cheapest, easiest laugh at every juncture.

I will give it credit for one thing, though: it brushes up against a genuinely interesting villain.

The first film’s Gozer had a plan I still, to this day, don’t entirely understand. It was a force of evil, though, and that’s all we had to know in order to enjoy the movie. The second film’s Vigo was far clearer about his intentions, but when all is said and done he doesn’t amount to much more than a guy in a haunted painting. If there’s anywhere a film can easily improve on the originals, it’s here.

And, hey, maybe Ghostbusters ’16 does. It could do a hell of a lot better, but I actually mean that as a compliment, because there’s so much here that could have worked perfectly.

Our villain is Rowan, a misfit who we see get both mistreated and outright bullied throughout the course of the film. It’s important that we see this, I think, because it helps us to understand where he’s coming from as he plots revenge. I don’t think we’re ever truly aligned with his perspective, which is fine, but we at least understand that he’s not doing bad things simply because we need a bad guy.

Rowan is an outcast. He’s emotionally damaged. He doesn’t want to be treated poorly, and yet he is indeed treated poorly. Constantly. By nearly everyone.

His plot involves activating ley lines throughout New York City. Why? Well, toward the end of the movie we see that the city has somehow been sucked back in time, or something? I don’t know; that doesn’t seem to follow logically from anything else, so I can’t say much about it. Does Rowan think New York was nicer back then? He’d fit in better back then? It’s never clear and I don’t know how this resolves his concerns with being bullied any more than I know why the past version of New York seems to differ only in terms of what the billboards are advertising, but let’s get back on track.

Rowan is releasing these ghosts as a sort of general punishment for the city that mocks and ridicules him. Okay. Then at one point, he kills himself and becomes a ghost. Within the reality of the film, fine. We never understood the mechanics of his devices or what they were truly capable of, so if the big machine in the basement turns him into a ghost, I’m okay with that.

Here’s where things get interesting: Rowan possesses Kevin, the Ghostbusters’ hunky, braindead receptionist.

Immediately, people start treating Rowan differently. He’s no longer unwelcome. Men joke with him as opposed to teasing him. Women notice him. His experience of being alive is entirely different not because he’s a different person, but because he looks different. Rowan even says to himself during this experience, “I definitely should have worked out more.”

Possessing Kevin seems to be teaching him something about his own role in the miserable existence he led. No, he couldn’t have snapped his fingers and looked like Chris Hemsworth, but maybe if he’d exercised a bit. Maybe if he saw a therapist who helped him through his hangups. Maybe if he surrounded himself with supportive friends and found a collection of people who would treat him better.

Instead of spending his time plotting revenge, he could have taken any step at all toward bettering himself.

I realize I’m getting dangerously close to victim blaming here, and I don’t intend to do that. I do intend to point out that within this specific movie, this specific character experiences life in another body and finds it more pleasant, happier, and more fulfilling by a factor of thousands.

It seems as though we’re building toward some kind of awakening. Perhaps Rowan would realize that his behavior, his mindset, his slovenly appearance contributed to his own mistreatment. He was mistreating himself, after all, both physically and emotionally…all the rest of the city did was join in. Maybe he feels remorseful after it’s too late, after he’s already released the contents of Hell itself into New York. Maybe he helps the Ghostbusters stop the ghosts, since he’s “crossed over” and can do things that they can’t. There is (forgive this) the ghost of a great idea there.

But no. That entire theme is abandoned, just like Rowan tosses Kevin’s body aside. That’s it. We establish an interesting idea that seems like it’s on the verge of saying something…and then we ditch it.

Rowan could have been and should have been the best thing about the film. Maybe he still is. But if I ever think about the character in the future, it won’t be anything I actually saw on the screen.

Hemsworth as Kevin is probably the worst thing about the film. The joke is that he’s stupid, I guess, in combination with being good looking. That’s fine, but his stupidity borders on retardation. He’s confused by telephones, speaks nonsensically, doesn’t know where he works or what the Ghostbusters do, and keeps drinking coffee and spitting it out all over himself because he doesn’t like it. The guy isn’t dumb; he’s brain damaged.

I’ve seen people suggest that this is some kind of subversive comment on the way women are often objectified in film and on television. They’re dumb but pretty, I suppose is their point. But I think that’s either a reach, or Feig massively bungled the execution.

For starters, having a male character be good looking and stupid isn’t subversive at all. We’ve seen good looking male dopes in media as long as media has been around. Just thinking of relatively recent examples, Zapp Brannigan, GOB Bluth, and John Hamm’s character on 30 Rock. I’m sure you can think of reams more. “Stupid” is the default comic character trait; people misunderstanding things is funny, so our comedies are populated with complete fucking imbeciles. Many of them are good looking, because they’re stars. A number of them are women. A number of them are men. To believe that your stupid male character comments on the trope in a way that every other stupid male character fails to is a pretty pompous mindset.

Where it mainly falls down here, though, is the fact that Ghostbusters never did that. What, exactly, are you undercutting? All that appalling sexualization of Janine?

You have every right to find Annie Potts attractive. (Annie, call me.) In the second film, I would definitely say she’s at least cute. But she’s never portrayed as dumb, and certainly is not portrayed as eye candy. She flirts a bit with Egon in the first film and gets ignored, and there’s an off-camera makeout session with Louis in the second film.

That’s it. Because she’s a character. She gets to be Janine Melnitz. She has so much to do and say that she never gets around to bending over desks and pressing her breasts together.

I’m being completely honest here. If anybody can truly make an argument for Janine being sexualized (inappropriately or otherwise), I’d love to hear it.

Nor is Dana sexualized. Zuul is, and it’s Dana’s body that Zuul possesses, but even that is scarier than it is sexy. Zuul grumbles and growls and levitates to keep the scene in which she tries to seduce Peter from being sexy at all.

And the actual Dana is portrayed in an even less sexy way. She’s lonely. She avoids human contact. She dresses in unflattering, frumpy ways with an emphasis on sweatclothes. She subsists on junk food. (“You actually eat this stuff?” asks an appalled Peter.) She’s also not in any sense of the word portrayed as an idiot. She’s cultured, she’s an accomplished classical musician, and she sees almost immediately through Peter’s posturing bullshit.

What is even remotely problematic in the original films? Where are the hypersexualized bimbos Ghostbusters ’16 feels obligated to undercut? If that’s the kind of comment it would like to make, it’s making it under the wrong banner. Remake an Adam Sandler movie, or something.

For a film crammed with toilet jokes, cheap gags, pop culture references, a complete disregard for narrative or characterization, jokes that were never funny to begin with being dragged out far longer than they should be, and, yes, active objectification of its own, Ghostbusters ’16 really has no right to try to “intelligently” comment on the medium as a whole.

I could go on. Shit, I haven’t even mentioned Lady Slimer.

So hey, let’s talk about Lady Slimer. Doesn’t it seem strangely counterproductive for a film interested in smashing gender barriers to create a female character by sticking a bow and some lipstick on an existing male one? Boy, it’s almost like this movie doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing.

When the initial backlash to Ghostbusters ’16 hit, Paul Feig said that people should wait and see it before passing judgment. That’s a fair perspective, of course. The suggestion was that it might be a much better movie than people suspected. Folks could sit around behind their keyboards and mock it, or they could head to the movies one weekend and find themselves pleasantly surprised.

But then the movie actually came out.

It well and truly sucked. And I hope my 8,000-word complaint proves that the extensive problems this movie has have nothing to do with anybody’s gender.

“Wait and see” was the correct way to shut up the detractors. Unfortunately, releasing a shitty movie was also the correct way to shut up the defenders.

People don’t speak much about Ghostbusters ’16 anymore. Compared to the original movie — which had at least a decade of profound pop-culture resonance, and arguably still resonates — this one barely merits a footnote.

I’m sure there are many people who enjoy it. (It received a number of positive reviews, at the very least.) I’m happy for them. But there are people who enjoy all kinds of bad movies. And, culturally, Ghostbusters ’16 has failed to catch much momentum. Those who do enjoy it must enjoy it quietly, because while I still see people bitching about it, I no longer see anybody coming to its defense.

Ghostbusters ’16 was intended to revitalize the franchise. And it could have. It could have even done so with exactly same actors we have here. But just as the characters are interchangeable, so is the film. For such a unique and beloved concept, this version of Ghostbusters is indistinguishable from any other brainless comedy that’s been released in the past 30 years.

It doesn’t know what it’s doing, it doesn’t know what it wants to be, and it doesn’t know what should set it apart. The first Ghostbusters was the perfect storm of every aspect working correctly and in tandem with each other. Ghostbusters ’16 is its perverse opposite. It’s a version of the film that crossed over from a universe in which nobody cared about making it any good.

Girl power, yes, fine, of course. Female artists across all forms of media have done incredible work throughout the course of creative history. Literally nobody with more than half a brain would ever argue otherwise. Hold up almost anything other than this soulless garbage if you feel the need to prove it.

Little girls deserve the kinds of movies little boys are given all the time, and by that I mean they deserve good ones. Ones that know what they’re doing. Ones that are genuinely, for any number of reasons, worth watching.

Age and gender aside, we all deserved better than Ghostbusters ’16.

In the case of Ghostbusters II, there’s no debating whether or not it’s better than the original. Of course it isn’t; Ghostbusters was a once-in-a-lifetime bolt of comic perfection. Whatever followed it up would have been at least a step down. The more salient question here is, is Ghostbusters II any good at all?

My answer to that is fairly complex.

At some point in college I began to reappraise the things I loved as a child. In many cases, what I loved held up, or seemed even better as an adult. For an example of that, see Ghostbusters. In other cases, of course, I felt disappointed or embarrassed by something I used to love. For an example of that, see Ghostbusters II.

As a child, I believed fully that Ghostbusters II was better than the original. Looking back, it’s fairly easy to see why. It’s sillier. There’s more action in it. There are more ghosts. My critical faculties weren’t developed at age eight, when I saw Ghostbusters II in theaters.

I loved it. I vividly remember coming home from the movie and spending the rest of that weekend drawing a comic book version, so that I could remember everything that happened. (I’m sure it was deeply inaccurate, and I wish I still had it.)

We got a copy of the VHS when that was released, and it was in constant rotation. Perhaps even moreso than the original. Then, of course, I grew up. Time passed. I read some great books. I wrote some bad ones. I began to see the difference between films that worked and films that didn’t quite. When I cycled my way back around to Ghostbusters II, it didn’t quite.

I had a similar experience with Back to the Future II. As a kid, it was unanimous among my friends that Back to the Future II was far superior to the original. (Nobody — repeat, nobody — liked Back to the Future III.) Again, it makes sense. It’s sillier. There are more special effects. And certainly more children dreamed of a thrilling, science fiction future than yearned for the quaint, small-town America of the 1950s.

The sequels to Ghostbusters and Back to the Future gave us more of what we wanted and, probably, gave our parents less of what they wanted. Therefore, they were better.

Rewatching Ghostbusters II as an adult was difficult. It was nowhere near as clever or interesting as the first film. It wasn’t as funny, though it had its moments. The big setpieces seemed cheap and obligatory as opposed to fresh and exciting. The improvisational feel of the original was replaced by performances that felt static and over-rehearsed.

I didn’t like it. I felt ashamed that I had ever liked it, and that I hadn’t recognized what an appalling drop in quality it represented when compared to the first.

So I filed that away, and didn’t watch Ghostbusters II again. Ever.

Until now, for this series, around 15 years later.

And, you know what? My opinion has changed again. It’s actually not a bad film. Not nearly. It’s certainly no Ghostbusters, but it’s also no Back to the Future III.

The fact that this film is so much weaker than the original isn’t easy to explain. All of the major characters return, played by the same actors. Director Ivan Reitman returns. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wrote the script again. (Though, this time, Ramis is credited first.) Even editor Sheldon Kahn returned. The ingredients were all there, so why does it fall so obviously short?

Ultimately, I think it’s just the fact that a sequel wasn’t planned. There was no story to tell, and therefore no compelling desire to tell it.

In the years since Ghostbusters won over global audiences, the brand only continued to grow. We talked last time about the merchandise, the cartoon, the toys, the foodstuffs…Ghostbusters was making a lot of money for everyone who had a stake in it.

And so, inevitably, Columbia Pictures wanted more. Aykroyd, Ramis, and Reitman were reluctant. They evidently felt that the first film was self-contained and there was nowhere left to go from there. That surprises me, as Ghostbusters‘ ending just sort of happens without any real feeling of closure. Again, this suggests to me that the creative team felt that Gozer actually was the important thing about that film.

I’d disagree. The film was about the Ghostbusters — those specific characters, who they were, what they wanted — and you could theoretically do any number of films about them. Introduce a different threat each time to spice things up, get some talented folks in to dream up new ghost designs, invent some new gizmos for the boys to play with, and off you go. I’m not saying that that would have been a wise thing to do, but it was certainly possible, and to believe Ghostbusters was impossible to follow up…well, that’s very strange to me.

I don’t know precisely why the team decided to cave to Columbia’s wishes, or rather I don’t know how many zeroes the reason had. But, of course, they did. They didn’t make another film because they had an idea they were desperate to get on screen; they made another film because that would make all of them a lot more money.

And so they wrote a new script and made a new film, and while it’s unquestionably the lesser one, it’s also not half bad. This time I not only went in expecting to dislike it; I wanted to dislike it, so that I could write a bunch of catty jokes for myself in this review. Sadly, you’ll have to deal with me engaging with the film respectfully and with a moderate degree of intelligence.

The opening of Ghostbusters II works damned well as an immediate followup to the end of the first film. There’s a 5 YEARS LATER caption, which strikes me as unnecessary, but otherwise the point at which the film opens lands as its own kind of joke.

Toward the end of the first film, there was an incredibly funny juxtaposition. We see the Ghostbusters arriving at Dana’s building to eliminate the nefarious Gozer and rid New York City of supernatural infestation once and for all. The streets are filled with adoring fans who cheer them on, who throng against police barricades to get as close as possible, who scream and cry with love. Peter works the crowd. The boys are heroes. The music swells…

…then we cut immediately to four out-of-breath men climbing twenty-one flights of stairs. They’re groaning and sweating. Peter says he’s going to throw up.

It’s perfect. It’s an absolutely perfect joke told in the absolute perfect way.

Ghostbusters II represents the same kind of cut. The first film ends with universal Ghostbuster adoration…then we cut to four aging, washed up men who will do whatever they need to do to make a buck. The illusion is shattered. They may or may not be heroes, but they’re certainly human.

That joke lands, too. But, you know, with a five-year gap between films, it’s not going to feel nearly as punchy.

We catch up with the guys more or less individually. They no longer work together, thanks to a judicial restraining order that “strictly forbids them from performing services as paranormal investigators or eliminators.” According to Peter, the city also stiffed them on the bill for their services in the first film. Though the Ghostbusters keep in touch, they all work to stay afloat in their own ways.

Egon seems to be doing the best of them. He conducts experiments at the Institute for Advanced Theoretical Research, where he has a well-stocked lab, a capable staff, and sweet, sweet funding. Peter embraces his inner gameshow host by headlining World of the Psychic, an interview show that provides a platform for frauds and lunatics to promote their books. (We only see one scene from the show, but I have it on reliable authority that it’s just about as good as Bass Masters.)

Ray has an occult bookstore, which may or may not be keeping him in groceries as he also performs at birthday parties with Winston for whatever desperate parents are willing to pay. Winston ceases to exist when the camera is off him.

The birthday party sequence is one of my favorites, and I love how deliberately it misrepresents the actual popularity of the Ghostbusters. In the real world, Ghostbusters as a brand was still very popular five years after the initial film, with the cartoon spinoff and tie-in products keeping children interested. Parents may certainly have been tired of the Ghostbusters — everything between the first and second film was pitched directly at their kids — but youngsters weren’t.

This sequence shows us a surprising inverse of their popularity in our world, as the kids here can’t stand them. They aren’t interested in the Ghostbusters, and they call out for He-Man instead. (In fairness, He-Man was also riding high at the time in reality.) They roll their eyes when Ray and Winston try to get the kids to sing along to their theme song. Eventually they are ridiculed into shutting down their performance altogether.

Ramis and Aykroyd can’t have been ignorant of the fact that kids could not get enough of the Ghostbusters. (Peter’s desperate claim, “The kids love us!” in the first film was remarkably prescient.) And I have distinct memories of Ghostbuster impersonators showing up to my friends’ actual birthday parties. We thought it was great. Why wouldn’t we? We recognized the uniform and the props, and though the guy dancing around was only pretending to be a Ghostbuster, well, that’s all we ever did, so what was the problem?

The film plays with the franchise’s own popularity and mocks it. This isn’t a world that got sick of Ghostbusters impersonators and toys and cartoons; this is a world that got sick of the actual Ghostbusters. Even now, though, in my 30s, I have to admit I’m jealous of the kids in this scene. I can’t imagine how excited they must have been not only to meet at least two actual Ghostbusters — in full regalia! — but to appear in the sequel. They do a fine job pretending to hate every second of it, but clearly we know better.

In fact, Ghostbusters II butts up against the idea of serving as an elaborate meta joke throughout, and I wish they did more with it, whether turning it into a proper runner or working it somehow into the plot. We’ll talk more about it in a while, but since it doesn’t make sense for anyone in New York City to not believe in ghosts, maybe the plot should instead involve the city giving its attention to a different set of fraudulent ghost hunters. Ones who claim they can do the job better and for less money than our heroes. Maybe they’re younger and more attractive. Toward the end, the real Ghostbusters have to show up and bail everyone out of trouble.

Much of the film could even play out the same way. Instead of the mayor and company knowingly ignoring the signs of coming trouble, as they do here, they instead ignore the Ghostbusters and their warnings because they have a new group of specialists working on it. You could even have the kids at the party call out for them instead of the irrelevant He-Man.

The meta joke is far from sustained, but we do get some fun with the original film’s legacy and merchandising. In the latest incarnation of the Ghostbusters commercial, Egon hawks a Ghostbusters “hot beverage thermal mug, and free balloons for the kids.” The theme song by Ray Parker Jr. — a number-one Billboard hit in real life — is revealed to exist in this universe as well, presumably written in response to their Gozer-stomping exploits. Janine steps on the franchise’s tagline with a stilted, “Who are you going to call?”

It’s fun, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Instead, the film’s plot is an extraordinarily straightforward one. Vigo the Carpathian, a demonic sixteenth century ruler, wants a child so that he can be reincarnated. He convinces someone to help him get that child, and the Ghostbusters stop Vigo before he can reincarnate.

I’m not skipping plot points there. I’m glossing over details, but I’m not leaving anything major out. This represents a heck of a change from the complex, meandering backstory of the first film, which included important events across several centuries and a number of crucial characters we never meet or hear much about. Here, it really is as simple as I put it. A bad guy wants to be reborn and needs a baby. The Ghostbusters beat him and save the kid.

I like that. I don’t necessarily think it’s an improvement on the first film in itself, but I’m certainly a fan of plots that can actually be understood by a general audience. What you do with that plot is up to you, but there’s a definite appeal to a story that’s simple at its core. I do, however, think that’s another sign that this isn’t exactly a story the team was eager to tell. We’ve seen how deep and complicated a story like that would be. This is a story that gets whipped together out of necessity. Pick a bad guy, pick a motivation, and go beat him up.

As I said last week, though, I don’t care much about the plot. It’s not what keeps me watching or what resonates with me. It doesn’t even interest me. What I care about is the interaction between the characters. The dialogue. The writing and delivery.

And, honestly, that’s where Ghostbusters II is at its weakest. The original film had a shaggy, improvisational feel. From what I understand, Bill Murray actually did improvise a number of his lines and reactions, but the entire movie feels that way. The characters aren’t just saying what the script tells them to say; they’re saying what they should say in the moment. It makes them feel real. Their quips are clever, Peter’s especially, but they don’t feel like they’re coming from cue cards held by a production crew just out of frame.

Ghostbusters II feels exactly that way. Everybody does seem to be repeating lines they’ve memorized. They feel too rehearsed. Too practiced. Perhaps part of the reason for that is that Ghostbusters came together piece by piece, without anyone really knowing what the movie would look like or be like (or who it would even star) until they were making it. They really did have to fly by the seat of their pants, and that bled into the performances in a thrilling way. Ghostbusters II, by contrast, would have had all of those questions answered before it was even a concept. The template was laid down, and now it was just a matter of filling it in.

This film has a number of funny lines and moments, but nothing that even comes close to a throwaway in the first film like, “You’re right; no human being would stack books like this.” “You’re named after a hot dog, you poor man” is simply no substitute. In that movie, Peter said what came to mind. In this one, Murray says what Ramis and Aykroyd told him to say.

In one clear parallel, there’s a line from Ray that appears in both films. In the first one, he finds Peter after the latter has been slimed in a hotel corridor. Ray exclaims, “That’s great!” Then, several moments later, he actually checks to see whether or not his friend is okay. In the second film, Ray exclaims, “That’s great!” again, this time when learning that Dana’s bathtub tried to eat her. He catches himself and explains what he means by that. Same line in the same context of the same basic joke. But the first feels natural and organic to the situation. The second feels manufactured. The seams are showing.

And, of course, the performances aren’t the only place we can see the seams. There’s also the basic premise of the film, which relies on a massive cheat only so that the template established by the original film could work again.

See, in that movie, the Ghostbusters performed their paranormal investigations, getting closer and closer to understanding an immediate and massive threat to humanity, centralized in New York City. Skeptical Peck, seemingly just for the sake of being an asshole, interferes with their work and has them arrested, which allows the danger to grow unchecked. The mayor, in the throes of desperation, frees the Ghostbusters and our heroes stomp out the threat.

That’s also exactly the way Ghostbusters II plays out. Just substitute Hardemeyer for Peck and “committed” for “arrested.” Again, fill in the blanks.

I’m not thrilled that they stole their own template for the sequel, but I can understand the appeal (or maybe even necessity) of doing so. What I can’t understand is why they didn’t seem to realize the massive logistical hole at the center.

See, here, five years after the close of the first film, disbelief in ghosts is no longer an option. There can be no skeptics. Folks have every right to doubt specific reports of sightings, or something, and to have their own theories about where ghosts come from or what they want, but people can’t outright reject the existence of ghosts as they were able to at the start of the first film.

Winston explains this in Ghostbusters. “I’ve only been with the company for a couple of weeks,” he said, “but I’ve got to tell you, these things are real. Since I joined these men, I’ve seen shit that’ll turn you white.” Seeing is believing. He joined the team for a paycheck, but once he sees ghosts with his own two eyes, he’s a convert.

By the end of that film, the entire City of New York — as well as the larger media, which we see has been following the Ghostbusters’ exploits — must also convert.

Period. End of story.

There may be some crackpots who conjure up a conspiracy theory instead, or somebody on a remote island without television service who refuses to believe written accounts, but, on the whole, the existence of ghosts has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.

There can no longer be skeptics. You don’t get to witness ghosts pouring through the city and interacting with people and objects and then go home and wonder if ghosts even exist. You don’t get to watch a 100-foot marshmallow man waddle through city streets, crushing buildings, climbing a skyscraper and leaving behind gallons of fluff and then question the existence of the supernatural. Everybody may have their own perspective on these events, but that perspective must necessarily include the existence of ghosts.

It would be like meeting Bigfoot. You have every right to not believe in him until the moment you meet him face to face. You see him. You interact with him. Maybe you fight him or become friends with him. It doesn’t matter, but the point is, you have a direct, first-hand account of the existence of Bigfoot.

What’s more, that encounter was witnessed by tens of thousands of spectators. It was covered extensively by the media. There is unquestionably video footage and photographs of the event. And, what’s more, if you went back to that site the next day, you’d find physical evidence everywhere. Mountains of Bigfoot hair, or maybe your initials and Bigfoot’s in a heart that you watched him carve into a tree.

You can’t have been dreaming. It’s impossible. There were too many witnesses and there’s too much evidence. You don’t get to say you don’t believe in Bigfoot. It would require so much in the way of mental gymnastics that, without trying to be offensive in the slightest, I believe continuing disbelief would qualify as mental illness.

Ghostbusters II, however, is full of skeptics. The most overt one is the judge who presides over the Ghostbusters’ case near the beginning of the film. He opens with this monologue: “The law does not recognize the existence of ghosts. I don’t believe in them either. I don’t want to hear a lot of malarkey about goblins and spooks and demons. We’re going to stick to the facts in this case and leave the ghost stories to the kiddies. Understood?”

And, frankly, he doesn’t get to do that. He was here for Gozer. We aren’t explicitly told how old the judge is, but I think it’s safe to say he’s older than five. It’s possible he moved to New York City within the past couple of years and wasn’t around for the fireworks, but surely he’s seen the stories in the press. Or he’s spoken to somebody who was there. Or he’s seen the repair work and cleanup crews.

Instead he, like many other characters in the film, doesn’t believe in ghosts. And that’s not okay. Anyone who expresses that opinion should clearly be confronted about it. They are wrong. Demonstrably, provably wrong.

It’s doubly frustrating in this scene, because the judge doesn’t have to be a supernatural skeptic to condemn the Ghostbusters. Ramis and Aykroyd rely on his disbelief in ghosts to get him fired up against the boys, but he already has a serious criminal charge to focus on: the Ghostbusters illegally drilled a hole in the middle of First Avenue and unintentionally cased a massive blackout. The judge can believe in ghosts — as he must — and still find the Ghostbusters guilty for the actual crime they committed. So why make him a skeptic?

It’s jarring and unnecessary. He has every right to be pissed at them for the crime they actually committed, but instead he gets upset because they believe in ghosts and he doesn’t. It makes no sense.

I’ve danced something a few times, but I might as well bring it up directly.

In the years since Ghostbusters II, New York City experienced an enormous, unexpected tragedy in the form of 9/11. As in Ghostbusters, the skyline was forever changed. As in Ghostbusters, throngs of spectators watched the carnage unfold. As in Ghostbusters, there was extensive press coverage that continued for years. In fact, the topic is still a common one, and understandably so.

I realize it might seem disrespectful to compare a real-life tragedy to the events of a sci-fi comedy. However, Ghostbusters II aims to show us the aftermath of New York tragedy, and reality has just so happened to show us exactly how it would go. In fact, if Ghostbusters II were released any time after 2001, with no changes whatsoever, and especially with its “come together in fellowship to defeat the negativity” ending, it would be impossible to read the film as anything except an allegory for 9/11.

And so you have fringe lunatics who may believe that 9/11 didn’t happen, sure, but they aren’t judges and assistants to the mayor. Can you even imagine someone holding public office in New York who was vocal about his belief that the tragedy at the World Trade Center never happened?

Those towers coming down affected everybody. There were those who were directly involved, whether as responders or victims. There were others who knew those involved, who panicked deeply because there was no way of knowing whether or not they were alive. There were others who were another degree removed…knowing somebody who knew somebody who was in the area. To this day we are screened more and more thoroughly in airports, to the point that a genuine argument can be made for the screening being invasive. (I have no criminal record whatsoever and have followed the rules at airports exactly the same way as I do everywhere else: to the letter. I’ve also been selected more than once to disrobe for a thorough search. I’ve had my genitals patted by gate agents. Why? They don’t have to tell me. And in my case, I can say for sure that it’s only because they decided to. If that is not invasive, I don’t know what is.)

Things changed. For a while, everything changed. For a while, it’s all anybody could talk about, and understandably so. For a while, it redefined the way we saw the world, our fears, our reactions to benign stimuli, such as the sound of a plane overhead.

That was 9/11. A real-life event committed by human beings.

Now imagine how much more it would be discussed, and for how much longer a period, if 9/11 were provably committed by ghosts. Think of how much more we would have to process the event. How much more would be thrown open to redefinition. How much more the world would have to change.

Ghostbusters II, coming long before 9/11, doesn’t realize this. It thinks that five years — or less — is plenty of time for an entire city to forget its common disaster. In the real world, we’re far from forgetting it seventeen years later.

The judge is also one of our first indications that the supporting characters no longer feel so gloriously real and human as they did in the first film. They’re cartoony here, and far less interesting and memorable for it. The judge pulls faces and rises up dramatically as he sentences the Ghostbusters. Janosz — played by Peter MacNicol, who we know can do much better work with cartoony characters than he does here — is too large a caricature to register as menacing, let alone interesting. Peter’s talk show guests are played explicitly for laughs and don’t feel anywhere near as real or relatable as his test subjects in the first film. All of this goes a long way toward making New York City in this film feel further removed from reality.

Even Janine becomes literally more of a cartoon, as she’s given a new appearance that’s closer to the Real Ghostbusters incarnation of the character. And, again, as a result she’s far less interesting and might as well be a different character altogether.

This is by no means a strike against Annie Potts, who is still very funny. It’s just that we got to know her as the type of crusty receptionist we might have to square off against at the DMV, and now, suddenly, she seems more like a naive art student. I’ll admit that this is truer to Potts’ actual age, but it’s strange seeing the same character played by the same actor in such a drastically different way. (I’ll be irrelevantly honest here, though, and say that Potts is cute as all hell in this incarnation.)

I will throw some props to the old man at the museum who is excited to meet Peter and expounds on his love of Bass Masters (“It’s a fishing show!”), because he feels very real to me, and he’s amusing enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with any supporting character from the first film.

Ghostbusters II is also chock full of solid ideas that don’t go anywhere, and moments that should feel inventive but instead feel empty and soulless. The slime blasters, for instance, are a nice way to avoid leaning on the first film’s proton packs, but they don’t really do anything. The boys spray them at some walls inside the Statue of Liberty, and then they hose down a prancing Janosz.

At one point Vigo seems to imprint upon Ray in the same way he imprints upon Janosz, which is genuinely unnerving and well-played by Aykroyd. But that also goes nowhere. Toward the end of the film it comes into play, admittedly, but only for a few seconds, and it doesn’t hinder the Ghostbusters taking down the villain in any way.

And the ghosts in general aren’t as interesting or creative as they were in the first film. There we encountered all kinds of ghosts that didn’t seem anything alike. Slimer, the librarian, the undead cabbie…they all felt very distinct in their design and their portrayal. Here, the equivalent ghosts wreaking equivalent havoc are just…there. The Scoleri brothers admittedly look pretty cool, but outside of them the ghosts are just differently colored and sized translucent blobs. It’s a massive failure of imagination.

And, hey, as long as we’re complaining: is Egon actually having sex with the slime? Or is that just some kind of brotherly ribbing I’m not privy to? He doesn’t say no, which concerns me. I can understand Peter joking about the possibility, but I can’t understand Egon sticking his dick into a bowl of ectoplasm.

But, hey, didn’t I say this movie was actually pretty good?

I did! And I stand by that, even if it is worth pointing out many of the reasons it has earned its dour reputation. It does falter. It is weaker. It is often absolutely stupid.

But it’s still a lot of fun. It’s not as funny or as interesting or as clever as the first one, but it’s a feel-good film. A comfort film. One you can turn on and be passively amused by without having to give it your full attention. As Father Crilly might put it, it’s chewing gum for the eyes.

And that’s okay. There’s nothing at all wrong with a movie that is only entertaining.

This time around, I went into Ghostbusters II expecting to enjoy one or two standout moments. Instead, I actually found a lot to like.

I like that Egon’s experiments about human emotions affecting the physical environment tie into the “mood slime” later. It makes his quick understanding of the slime feel like less of a contrivance. He’s already tested the theory; he’s primed to make the connection.

The slime itself is a great motif (and also seems to draw on the popularity of the cartoon series and the toys, which featured slime extensively), and it makes for some truly great visuals. I also like that it works as social commentary, with the New York City setting already being perfect for a plot about negative energy.

I like that we get more Winston, as he’s a member of the team from the start, and that Ernie Hudson gets more to do. I like the “Do-Re-Egon” bit because come on how can anybody not?

I really like the dancing toaster, which is one of film’s most memorable moments to me, and expertly turns plot exposition into visual spectacle. (It also inextricably linked “Higher and Higher” to this film for me, just as “Tequila” is permanently associated with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.)

I like Peter playing Dana’s cello as a bass guitar. I like his interactions with baby Oscar, which feel warm and genuine, and represent a believable evolution for the immature womanizer we met in the first film. I like that Janine zips Louis into Egon’s uniform, a great visual for the way he’s supplanted the previous object of her affections.

I adore Aykroyd’s childlike excitement when he finds Peter and Dana in the fancy restaurant, and his gesticulating launches slime onto another diner. It’s one of the few moments in which the character feels real again, and it works perfectly as both characterization and an unexpected visual gag.

And so I end this review where I began it: conflicted.

I expected to unload on Ghostbusters II. I expected to break it down, paragraph by paragraph, explaining why almost nothing works. I expected to feel embarrassed all over again by the fact that I ever enjoyed it.

But all it did this time was convince me that it’s worth shutting your mind off every so often. When I rewatched this in college, I was so distracted by its bad decisions that I didn’t acknowledge its good ones. Now, expecting those bad decisions, I was able to shift my focus elsewhere. To the lines and moments that work. To the dancing toasters that remind you that it’s okay to just have fun sometimes. To the sheer, unavoidable joy of seeing the team back in uniform, even if their second outing is nowhere near as good as their first.

But that was also the last time we’d see them in uniform. We never got a Ghostbusters III, though Aykroyd evidently did have a concept for it. (This was cannibalized to some degree for a video game in 2009, which saw the cast reunite for voice acting duties.)

Of course, where there’s money to be made, there’s somebody interested in making it. Columbia Pictures didn’t make quite as much money on Ghostbusters II (it had a slightly larger budget and pulled in a bit less than the original) but the film was certainly a financial success. Columbia wanted a third.

In 2016, they got that third, with an all-new cast and creative team behind it.

Only this time, it starred some women.

Join me next week, when I’ll cover the most idiotic controversy in modern history.