The Ghostbusters remake, which I thankfully didn't spend a dime on to see, was such garbage. Ignore the remake backlash, ignore the inflated "baww they're women" backlash which was largely orchestrated by Sony (shame on Sony for that btw). The movie is just awful. Badly written, badly edited, no sense of a consistent tone. The move shifts from being a horror movie to a slapstick comedy to an "Airplane!"-style spoof to a gross out comedy to a edited-for-tv Paul Feig movie.
The villain has these terrible monologues while sneaking around the city, talking about how he was bullied as a kid. His plan is literally drawn out in a "secret" journal, complete with cartoon drawings of how the third act is meant do go down. For no reason whatsoever he can die and become a powerful ghost.
The editing, as mentioned, is awful. Characters will shift between poses between cuts and full sequences have been terribly removed. Like, there was this dance number that was cut because test audiences hated it, so out of nowhere the military snap into this disco pose. No reason given, they just freeze in place. Music, written for the film, will play over a scene and fade out just as the lyrics start. Remember in the original you got a good chunk of the original music and lyrics playing over montages? Not here. You get a snippet of the theme over the intro while the word GHOSTBUSTERS in a lazy font floats over the city. No effort to animate the intro or show anything of interest. Just stock footage of camera flyovers and lazy font and a too brief play and fade out of the theme.
Paul Feig goes out of his way to thumb his nose at "tha haterz" with a lame YouTube comments joke and making most of the men look like idiots. Kevin is the worst offender. The guy is... how do I put this... he's retarded. Like, he actually does some of the stupidest shit for laughs. It's beyond Homer Simpson levels of stupid. It's supposed to be funny, but it is not. It's just baffling as to why they thought "put a pretty man with brain damage" into the story. McCarthy and Wiig are pretty one dimensional and just not that interesting. Wiig basically plays her usual neurotic character and McCarthy plays her usual loudmouthed character. Both are apparently old friends, but it never plays out that way on screen – both when they are apparently butting heads and when they are friends again in the end. McKinnon's character is awful, chewing scenery left and right and overacting every moment she can. It's like watching a little kid in a movie they made with their friends, where they try and act as batshit insane as possible to make their friends laugh offscreen but it does not translate at all for the audience's enjoyment. Jones is not as awful as I expected, but the loud angry black woman shtick gets pretty bad at times. The original two movies never played up Ernie Hudson's race, but here Jones relies on it way too much for failed laughs.
Jokes fall flat all over the place. In the original movie, jokes stemmed from the plot and moved things forward. In the remake, there are so many non-sequiters like this weird running gag on McCarthy's character wanting more wontons in her soup and a scene where a guy is giving them the finger in various stupid ways.
Also, in-universe rules make no sense. They apparently kill ghosts with their beams instead of capturing them, and there is no containment unit, just a trap. Ghosts can be dragons for some reason, and evil parade floats. Did a dragon and parade float die and become a ghost.
Anyway, I'm glad this movie is a flop. I hated it. Probably the worst movie I have ever seen based on a franchise I love, with only The Amazing Spider-Man 1&2 coming a close second and X-Men: The Last Stand a distant fourth.
1/10
