I love both of the original movies.  They’re perennial ’80s classics, even the second one!  A perfect blend of humor, horror, and action.  The modern day she-boot unfortunately fails to hit that combination, but remains an entertaining watch.  I’m all for the idea of “she-boots”, I say bring on more!  But in this case, it’s only good, not classic.

For the most part, the humor works.  I laughed a lot at this movie, but a lot of jokes also fell flat.  This was actually my biggest disappointment, since I found the director’s previous movies Spy and The Heat to be absolutely hilarious.  Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig unfortunately don’t get a lot of chances to be as funny as they can be.  Fortunately, Kate McKinnon absolutely steals the entire show.  She doesn’t even have a lot of dialogue but she’s always doing something interesting in every single scene, most especially when she’s quiet and in the background.  It’s a bizarre performance in all the right ways, and actually left me thinking about her character and history more than anyone else.  Leslie Jones is also great in the movie.  Chris Hemsworth is hilarious as the dumbest dude on Earth, though a lot of the jokes are just ridiculous.

The movie suffers in the horror and story department.  I wouldn’t call anything in this movie scary or unsettling, except for the opening scene.  An overabundance of cartoony CGI ruins any hope of that.  There’s some nifty visuals and action scenes, but nothing as iconic as just about every ghost scene in the first two movies.

The biggest disappointment is the villain.  I don’t want to spoil too much, but the villain is extremely small and uninteresting.  This guy can’t hold a candle to Gozer or Vigo.

Ghostbusters (2016)

6.8

Story/Writing

7.0/10

Characters

8.0/10

Pacing

6.0/10

Emotional Connection

6.0/10

Wildcard

7.0/10

Pros

  • The cast, particularly Kate McKinnon.
  • Most of the humor.
  • The callbacks to the originals.

Cons

  • The villain.
  • The (lack of) horror.
  • Some of the humor.