Reviving the ghosts of the past

Defiantly entertaining remake of the 1980s comedy Dir: Paul Feig 1hr 56mins (12A)

“This movie is ruining my childhood.” That sad little lament, posted anonymously online, sums up the extraordinary furore aroused by the news that the 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters – about a team of paranormal researchers investigating spooky goings-on in New York, was going to be remade – wait for it… with a mainly female cast, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. Even Donald Trump expressed his disgust at the prospect in a video blog. Well, now the film is out and I’m afraid the angry fanboys are going to be even angrier. Because these female Ghostbusters are, quite simply, superb. “They are hilarious. They are smart. They are utterly dorky. They are totally badass.”

In the original film, the comedy was rooted in the inappropriate cockiness of its deeply flawed male protagonists, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. This hilarious, whip-smart update reverses those traits, making its heroines “hyper-capable but self-doubting”. Kristen Wiig plays an earnest physicist who reluctantly joins her eccentric friend Abby (Melissa Mccarthy) in a quest to prove that ghosts exist. Soon, however, they are forced to don overalls and strap on ghost-busting plasma blasters, after New York is beset by a plague of paranormal activity conjured by an occultist nerd (Neil Casey). Their gang is augmented by the feisty Patty (a “terrific” turn from Leslie Jones) and beefy Chris Hemsworth as their dumb blond secretary, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. (The latter has a dog named Mike Hat, which makes for a few amusing misapprehensions.) But the “breakout star” is newcomer Kate Mckinnon as the wacky tech specialist, Jillian. Her sassy, freewheeling style comes closest to channelling the anarchic spirit of Bill Murray’s character in the first film. The over-the-top Mckinnon certainly steals many of the scenes, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, but only in the way that Ronnie Biggs robbed trains. In other words, you just wish she’d stop. Wiig and Mccarthy are also pretty hammy. But I sense “the spectre of a gender divide” on this one – I know several women who loved this movie. It’s true that none of the cast is as good as Murray, but that’s setting the bar pretty high, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. And there’s one respect in which this film is actually streets ahead: its special effects are brilliant, particularly in a showdown that sees the gang taking on a horde of ghouls in Times Square. Let’s face it: the original Ghostbusters was “hardly a work of genius”, and this “subversive” reboot more than lives up to it, said Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out. After all, it’s “a summer movie starring a girl squad” who are proud of their “big brains”. Some might say that constitutes “a supernatural event in itself”.