Perhaps I should have called this post 'Laughterthoughts'. Unfortunately though, there aren't that many laughs in the new
Ghostbusters soft reboot - although OTOH it could have been much, much worse. It is scary, in parts, but with the honest exception of Paul Rudd's performance it's not really funny.
The decision to go full Stranger Things was brave and mostly worked. Wolfhard now plays horny teenage everynerd more or less pat, though his character is underwritten and underused. He's basically the new Peter Venkman except that he fails to get into the girl's knickers. And of course he's not funny either. His consolation prize - and it's a fairly meagre one, given that he's the only one of the "kids" who can feasibly do it - is that he gets to drive the Ectomobile. (Having him as an anaemic Michael Taylor at least meant we were spared a Short Round.) The younger children are also OK. The girl is better than the boy: she's Spengler's granddaughter and a reasonable stand-in for her grandpa, and the boy just about captures Stanz's slow-witted, well-meaning enthusiasm. Only the token black girl - who by process of elimination is there to be a female Zeddemore* - really lives down to expectations.
In theory of course Ghostbusters as a concept should work just as well with any group of early middle-aged, middle-class white men (and their token black friend) who are down on their luck (sacked academics dressed like plumbers going into business in the real world) but make it big by doing something whackily fantastical in a relatively cool, deadpan, Noo Yawk sort of way. In practice though, the camaraderie between Egon, Ray and Venkman was something special, and the real-life friendship between Ramis and Murray was extra special. (Murray's double take at the end of Afterlife when Venkman sees Spengler's ghost is funnier and more emotional than anything else in the whole film.) The first film was originally envisioned for Belushi and Eddie Murphy, and it would no doubt have been perfectly good with them. But without Bill Murray it would only have been half the film it turned out to be, and even today Murray could almost certainly improvise his way half-way through a Ghostbusters film without breaking sweat.
Including the original Ghostbusters at the end was the right decision. Unfortunately in just a couple of minutes they demonstrate what was lacking in the movie - which was, of course, them. Murray in particular proves quite how much of the original film really was just him, and manages to improvise in the space of a few lines more humour, charm, pathos and excitement than the rest of the cast does in the previous hour and a half.
And of course the real ghost elephant in the room is Melissa McCarthy. There's a real sense of Ghostbusters: Afterlife's being really just a franchise palate-cleanser, and as such it was certainly worth it.
*Winston Zeddemore was originally supposed to be ex-military. By the time of the videogame he's got a PhD. In practice he arrives only just in time to be the straight man (i.e. just before Sigourney Weaver becomes a dog), albeit only narrowly avoiding being the "comedy stupid one" (and let's face it, that's more or less what he is in Ghostbusters II).
