Monday 25 June 2018

Ghostbusters Answer the Call (2016) Review

Ghostbusters Answer the Call (2016)


Well, last week I reviewed Tomorrowland. A good film. Not a brilliant one, but still a good one. The point was not every film has to be Citizen Kane, or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Some can just be good without being great or iconic. 

Not everything has to be a ten out of ten story. You don’t need to dine out at a fine restaurant every day, if you did it would soon become bland and tasteless. You can enjoy fish and chips from the chippy down the street too and often because of that you’ll enjoy the more elaborate stuff more.

So in this metaphor where does Ghostbusters Answer the Call (2016) come in? It’s the refried Chinese you got yesterday, at the discount counter, that leaves you vomiting into a bucket for the rest of the day. It’s bad, it leaves an unpleasant taste in your mouth and quite frankly I could have and should do without it.

The only reason I’m reviewing this mess is that there’s something that bugs me about it. Actually there’s quite a few things that bug me about it and it’s going to be a long list if I have to tick every one off. Fortunately there are other reviews out there that have done a far better job of eviscerating this film and laying its many flaws bare for all to see.

That said there are a couple off arguments against this film that I haven’t seen very often, if at all, and they outline what really went wrong with Ghostbusters. What the real problem, deep down at it’s very core, was. The only way to stop it from happing again is to rummage through the wreckage left in this film’s wake and drag the last dregs of it’s iniquity kicking and screaming into the light.

The light being an obscure blog review perhaps no-one is going to read, but still, it’s a light. Of sorts.

But before all that I have to preface this with something. Two quick points, the first is the cast. I’ve seen a few of the actors in this cast in other things. Most notably Hemsworth, but I’ve seen the main four as well. Some in films I like, others not so much. Casting for me is not really an issue and if you want an all girl team? Heh, why not? The cast and director didn’t appeal to me on paper, but I like to think I was open enough to have given it a chance. The other point is the remake issue. I like the original Ghostbusters, again I think it’s a good film. I don’t quote it, I don’t watch it every halloween as some people do. I don’t set up a shrine and worship at the alter of Harold Ramis. It’s a good film and if I want to watch it I will. It’s a solid eight out of ten for me. So I don’t violently object to a reboot, I would want it done well surely but I don’t object.

So going into this film I wasn’t hopeful, but I expected something worthwhile. Something that tried to live up to the expectations of the very much established and somewhat fanatical existing fanbase. Sort of like the 2007 Transformers movie. Instead we got a mess on par with Revenge of the Fallen.

The first hurdle, and the film stumbles on that early on is the opening, where we see the logo for “Ghost Corps”.  Now this has been mostly forgotten in all the following mess, but this was meant to the start of a series of films. A connected expanded universe, just like the Marvel MCU. Every film studio wants an MCU these days. It was a risk ten years ago, but it’s paying off with Disney/Marvel making billions with every entry. Other companies are eying that literal mountain of money jealously. With Universal dusting off their classic monsters, Warner Brothers rushing out the DCEU and so on. Why shouldn’t Sony try to jump on the band waggon with, lets face it, the only really successful nostalgic property they have to hand?

Well how have all the other examples gone? Poorly is the nicest way of putting it. With films like The Mummy and Justice League killing the project where it starts. Ghostbusters (2016) is offhandedly added to that list as after it’s poor performance it’s very unlikely we’re going to see it spawn a franchise.

But why? Well there isn’t a simple answer. I could site how Justice League was rushed, trying to cram about six movies and ten years worth of establishing and action into three. Not taking the time to introduce audiences to the rich DC mythos, or which of the many different versions of said mythos their going to use. That wasn’t the case in Ghostbusters Answer the Call. No Ghostbusters made a different mistake, rebooting the franchise.

You see Ghostbusters already had the prefect setup, there were already two very popular movies that were easily available, but both were focused on and in New York. By choosing another American city, say Chicago, and seeing it in the same universe they could have easily pulled in the cameos and have the new team set up a fresh. This would include the original films, show how things have moved on and at the same time progress. Hell you could even make a meta joke about the whole thing. Instead they removed the very thing they were relying on, nostalgia. Alienating the audience immediately. Starting the film off on a bad note that only got worse.

Now it’s possible that it wasn’t the Director or the co-writer’s fault (we’ll get to that in a moment). Studios these days put a lot of money forward to make films and they expect to get some say in the production. A lot of good films are weakened by the studio thinking they know best, with focus groups, random charts and supposed experts making suggestions that go against the creator’s intent and ruining a project. Sometimes even going so far as reshooting and editing the final product without the Director’s input or permission. It’s a rare director that’s able to avoid this studio interference and more often than not they don’t. So I can’t lay the blame entirely on Paul Fieg and his team.

What I can do is bring up two points that do blame him for. Two point that I feel took a bad situation and made it infinitely worse. I’m talking, first of all, about ad-lib.

I love watching clips of Whose Line is it Anyway. The show is a series of ad-lib-ed scenes where a group of comedians are given a very rough premise, or prop without context and asked to do something funny with it. It’s hilarious. You’ve got four very funny people on a stage, bouncing off one another in front of a live audience creating great comedy moments. So why am I opposed to ad-lib comedies? It’s the premise, see Whose Line uses the trappings of a game show, even though it goes out of the way to point out it doesn’t matter. The four on stage are trying to one up each other, to get a better reaction from the audience. They are also trying to break the others concentration, get them to slip up. It’s that competition that adds an edge to proceedings. Also the sketches are short, a few minutes at best so the performers have to be on their game from the beginning. Sure there are edits and the like for the TV version, but they’re playing first and foremost to the live audience. Not for the edit.

Ghostbusters plays as a Whose Line or Saturday Night Live (again short sketches with a live audience) skit stretched over the film’s nearly two hour runtime. Without an audience. You get, what is in effect, four or five people joking with each other about the fact they are in a Ghostbusters movie. Whole scenes drag on too long, jokes fall flat, but because everyone is having such a good time they don’t care. To do comedy well you have to take it seriously. The timing of the gags has to be spot on, the subtle nods and call backs have to set up in advance and not lost in the haze. Performance comedy is not film comedy. While you can include skits and of hand jokes the real humour comes long term. There is a big difference between the two styles and unfortunately Fieg didn’t recognise that.

Good comedies are painstaking put together. The script is polished until it shines and then polished some more. It’s a perfectionist’s nightmare pulling together the right cast and crew to get it all to hit just right. When it works you get comedy gold, with a situation comedy like Ghostbusters you need to get the timing and rhythm to hit just right, striking a balance between laughs and drama. Only with a skilled director do you get that right. In the wrong hands you get a mess.


Think of it like this; a good teacher can make a lesson fun and engaging and by the end their pupils will have learnt something and had a good time doing it. A bad teacher will try to control a class, fail and while the kids still have fun and a good laugh nothing is accomplished. Feig is a bad teacher, he had no control over his cast and they ran roughshod all over the place. The end result was a unstructured mess leaving the editor to try and piece together something out of hours of unusable footage. If there was a writer involved it was the barest of plot outlines, a skeleton to hang an improv act on and that’s not a good film comedy.

But that’s still not the worse aspects in my opinion. Somewhere along the line Feig made a strange decision that is just visually obnoxious and incredibly distracting. I’m not sure how to describe this but he tried to have parts of the film bust out of the screen in a pseudo 3D effect.



They put black bars at the top and bottom of the film and then at seemingly random have things in the shot overlaid on top. I can’t find a practical reason other than it adds a visual style. This along with the oversaturated colour palette makes the whole thing almost cartoon-y. If that was the goal it backfired spectacularly, constantly pulling me out of the film and making me question just what the filmmakers were trying to do. When you’re more interested in a visual faire than the actual story there is something seriously wrong.

Finally I’m going have to tackle the writing and the characters. I’m going to do this with Hemsworth’s Kevin as an example. Now I like the gender swap, the idea that he is handsome but incredibly stupid hired because he’s pretty is fun. For about a minute. Then it gets old really fast. When his stupidity is turned up to eleven, at one point forgetting how to breathe, it gets out of control. Then you realise that is the whole joke. That’s it. He’s stupid. A one note joke that comes form nowhere, goes nowhere and has about as much to do with the plot as a boil on the backside. 

What would have been more interesting would have been to keep him functionally moronic, but give him a talent. He’s supposedly a graphic designer, but he’s bad at that to. So how about making him a fantastic classical artist? Able to paint or sketch almost lifelike portraits in moments but hopeless when it comets the abstract. Or how about something completely out of the blue, like he’s a living satnav that knows the directions to everywhere somehow? Or keeping in with the supernatural theme, incredibly lucky. Just somehow, in some way unknown, the gods of luck and fortune smile down on him and he just happens to either be in the right place at the right time or find just what is needed in the nick of time. That would be funny, not that original but depending on how you use it, could be interesting and useful in the terms of the plot.

Same for all the characters, they are all horribly two dimensional. There are brief snippets of a deeper personally in some of them but unfortunately, like Kevin, most is just the punch line for a single gag that never lands. If they had spent more time developing the characters and less on pointless and incredibly intrusive dance numbers it would have been a much better movie.

Oh and on the dance number; we saw it done some time ago with The Mask. Where the cartoon anti-hero uses his god-like powers to distract an entire police force by making them dance. Ghostbusters Answer the Call does exactly the same thing, only while the whole point of The Mask was that he did irrelevant cartoon stuff because he treated the whole thing like a joke. This dance number in Ghostbusters was supposed to be part of the villain’s grand plan to bring about the apocalypse.

Somehow I knew it would end this way. One badly choreographed Strictly Come Dancing number and God looking down upon creation and saying ‘Well that was a disappointment’ Ending this great experiment we call existence once and for all.

Do you see where the problem is? instead of a clever, punchy and respectful comedy that mixed drama, humour with just a dash social commentary we got a disjointed badly put together mess of an over long sketch with the trappings of an action film and a franchise bolted on badly.

Ghostbusters Answer The Call (2016) isn’t just a bad movie, it isn’t just a bad movie that all bad movies should be measured against as a yard stick (that’s actually Josh Trank’s Fan4stic (2015) which I may get to later) It’s just bad. It’s a milestone around the neck of comedy itself. A death knell rung on the bell of cinema. Avoid, even if curious.

IMDB score:- 5.3 out of 10
Rotten tomatoes:-  52% 

My score:- 1 out of 10 Watch almost anything else!

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