Golly, this movie was boring. I have no idea how many times I checked my watch, but it was a lot.
Thanks to convenient plot devices, nearly every character from Ghostbusters: Afterlife is back, even though the new movie is in New York. So many internships in Manhattan for small town Oklahoma kids! Everyone seems to have had the character bled out of them. Mckenna Grace as Phoebe does the best with what she’s given, but she sure isn’t given very much. Tons of characters could have disappeared without an impact on the story.
I heard that this movie was trying to lean more into the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, and if you leave out the sex dungeon jokes it definitely seems like an episode of a cartoon instead of a movie. There’s a Ghost of the Week, a problem to solve, and everything is back to the status quo at the end. There was also just about enough plot to carry one 30 minute cartoon.
…oh, and one more thing…
The Walter Peck Problem
In the first movie, William Atherton as Walter Peck is a representative of the EPA who tries to shut down the Ghostbusters. In this movie he’s somehow become the mayor, and he tries to shut down the Ghostbusters.
Both times, he’s right.
An EPA inspector absolutely should be trying to stop people from running around New York with portable nuclear accelerators that can (and do) endanger people and destroy property. A mayor absolutely should stop people from causing death and destruction. Ray casually giving a ball that tested off Evil Scale to someone to use for low security experiments definitely lead to multiple deaths.
Peck’s problem isn’t that he’s wrong about the Ghostbusters; it’s that he uses bad methods to get rid of them. If he had better management skills (or better advisors) the big bad ghost never would have been released.