MOVIE REVIEW: New Ghostbusters buries good cast of characters in special effects, lifeless story

It's hard to tell which was more depressing: the whining from alleged males about how their precious Ghostbusters had been defiled by featuring a new all-female cast or the curiously dull trailers that have circulated around the web.

Now that Paul Feig's reworking of the 1984 hit is finally on the big screen, it's actually disappointing to say the new film is far more enjoyable than the unbearable Ghostbusters 2 (you know a movie sucks when its sole virtue is a Bobby Brown song) or that terrible cover that Fall Out Boy made of Ray Parker Jr.'s original theme song.

Feig's last few films, like Spy and Bridesmaids, have impressively balanced gross-out humor and compassion for his sometimes troubled characters. With the former, Feig also demonstrated an eye for staging action scenes that made his movies look far more expensive than they actually were.

With his new take on Ghostbusters, Feig and just about everything else in the film seem subdued by special effects that are both cluttered and obligatory. Feig's comedies have tended to be character driven, and that's hard to set up when viewers are expecting legions of ghosts to not be afraid of.

To their credit, Feig and co-screenwriter Katie Dippold drop lots of little nods to Dan Aykroyd and the late Harold Ramis' original tale, but for the most part act as if the previous film and Parker's catchy question never happened.

In this version Kristen Wiig plays Erin Gilbert, a Columbia University physics professor who's on the verge of getting tenure. Because her career is on the line, she hopes that the world will forget an obscure book she wrote with her childhood pal Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) about the paranormal. The two former friends wind up reuniting when they discover the phenomena they explored but couldn't prove in print are now happening all over New York.

Joined by wisecracking gadget guru Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), a transit employee whose brain has a built-in Google Maps, the new Ghostbusters develop ways to combat and trap malevolent spirits despite the fact that the city and the media discount their existence. With limited resources, they have to settle for hiring the male equivalent of window dressing. Kevin (Chris Hemsworth) can't take a message to save his life and is a fountain of bad ideas.

Then again, with his abs and dance moves, he almost makes up for the fact that answering the phone isn't part of his skill set. The team members find their workload increasing because a disgruntled janitor (Neil Casey) has been summoning specters to attack people he thinks have wronged him.

Feig and Dippold have the unenviable task of making up a worthwhile new story while keeping fans of the first movie -- like me -- happy. Some of the gags seem lazy (perfunctory cameos by Aykroyd and Sigourney Weaver), but others are inspired. Hemsworth has a ball lampooning his superhero image, and Bill Murray's brief turn as a Ghostbuster skeptic is expectedly funny.

It's nice to see Murray given something interesting to do, and he forces the new cast to rise to the challenge.

As she does in just about every episode of Saturday Night Live, McKinnon walks away with the film. Her geeky but ornery countenance is a lot more fun to watch than the sketchy longtime friendship between Wiig and McCarthy. Developing that relationship could have resulted in some more fully realized sequences and given the story more depth and laughs. Wiig and McCarthy, for the most part, serve as decent straight women to McKinnon and Jones, but it seems as if Feig is underutilizing his formidable leading ladies.

Perhaps he could have spent less time showing off armies of flying apparitions. After a while, it's easy to become more exhausted than haunted by all the ghosts.

MovieStyle on 07/15/2016