GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE gets swallowed up in its own nostalgia trap

It’s hard not to view Ghostbusters: Afterlife as a direct reaction to Paul Feig’s 2016 Ghostbusters reboot. Feig’s gender-swapped entry recast the team of the four initial Ghostbusters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson) with four hilarious women (Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones), and in general, maintained the spirit and tone of the beloved 1984 film. Even with a killer cast, many of the fanboys that had grown up with the original Ghostbusters films were incensed with the change even before they had seen the film, banding together to loudly denounce the film on social media and flood Rotten Tomatoes and YouTube with disparaging (and often incredible sexist) remarks.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife feels like a concession to the worst kind of fan; this is a movie so indebted to the past that it constantly bypasses the interesting new additions it brings to the table in favour of repeated callbacks to the original film and its aging cast members. Directed by Jason Reitman (Juno), the son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two Ghostbusters films, Ghostbusters: Afterlife should feel like a celebration of a franchise that has persisted for nearly four decades, but instead feels like it’s trying to appease the sort of outspoken toxic fans that have recently begun to reshape pop-culture in increasingly reactive ways.

The film addresses Harold Ramis’ passing right off the bat; after dying alone on a remote farm in Oklahoma where he had become known as the town weirdo, Egon Spencer’s estranged daughter Callie (Carrie Coon, The Leftovers) comes to help settle his affairs. She has her two teenage children in tow, Trevor (Stranger Things‘ Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace, Crash & Bernstein), who do their best to try to adjust to their new life out in the sticks. Phoebe quickly becomes friends with an equally nerdy “Podcast” (Logan Kim), while Trevor falls head-over-heels for Lucky (Celeste O’Connor), who also happens to be the daughter of the town’s Sheriff. Not to be left out, Callie soon begins spending time with the kids’ teacher Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), who quickly begins to suspect that something supernatural is at work in his sleepy small town and that the Spencer family lies at the very heart of it all.

Taking the very New York-centric Ghostbusters idea and transposing it to a small rural town is a fun idea, and at least initially, offers a different way into the sort of chaos a ghost can cause outside of a major city. Of course, this is terrain mined in the wildly successful Netflix show Stranger Things, which is in itself an homage to ’80s films like Ghostbusters and E.T. Casting Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard here is a direct nod to that tail-eating-itself lineage, and he brings in the right amount of teenage angst and awestruck wonder at the supernatural elements that he displays on that show, even as he looks a decade older than when we saw him in the last season of Stranger Things.

Mckenna Grace also leaves a lasting impression as the shy but brilliant Phoebe Spengler, and the chemistry between Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd as a new couple trying to find their footing amidst all the ensuing ghostbusting chaos has all the warmth and one-liners of any good rom-com.

Yet despite all of the incredible new talent the filmmakers have assembled for the film, they never trust them enough to focus on their story for long without constant references to the original films and characters. It’s the same sort of problem that plagued another vaulted franchise with Star Wars: The Force Awakens; the new cast can never really shine when the filmmakers seem more excited to continuously keep trotting out the middle-aged franchise stars we all remember from our youth.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t elicit the same feeling, especially here. With all love and respect to Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, they don’t have the same bustling energy and verve they did when Ghostbusters opened nearly 40 years ago (Ernie Hudson does look and sound nearly identical though). While their parts are modest here (this shouldn’t be considered a spoiler since they’re in the trailer and have been making the talk show rounds to promote the movie), they do come in at a crucial moment in the story that zaps any agency from the new characters that we have been following for the entire film.

Your appreciation for Ghostbusters: Afterlife will really come down to what you expect from a sequel like this. If you were hoping for an entirely new chapter in the franchise made up of an exciting new cast, you may be disappointed. If, for some reason, you wanted a story strung together just to get the band back together so you could see some middle-aged guys in khaki suits battling a very familiar villain, then have at it, because this film seems entirely oriented around that empty nostalgic experience.

The end result is so frustrating because Jason Reitman (who also co-wrote the film with Gil Kenan) had all the elements here to kickstart the franchise anew. The cast has great chemistry, there are some solid jokes and the rural setting made this film feel like a real departure from the films that preceded it. Instead, we get an awkward hodgepodge of new and old that never entirely works together. Let the original gang have a break; it’s time to let the kids bust some ghosts of their own.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is in theatres now.