Ghostbusters (2016)

One should be careful what they do as a prank, you never know when it will come back to bite you. Erin Gilbert knows this all too well. When she was in college, her and a friend, Abby Yates, wrote a book on paranormal activity. Thinking the book would never see the light of day, Erin forgot about it until years later as she is working towards tenure at a prestigious university. It seems that Abby never actually got rid of all the copies of the book, and Erin's bosses at the university randomly came across it. Erin meets up with Abby to force her to get rid of the book, and through the circumstances of their reunion ultimately loses her job at the university...but ends up proving the existence of paranormal activity. Erin and Abby begin to work together in order to focus their efforts on exposing the truth on the paranormal in New York City, eventually bringing on two other women to help: Jillian Holtzmann and Patty Tolan.

Like virtually everyone who heard the original Ghostbusters was getting a reboot, I was highly skeptical about seeing it. The trailers never seemed all that funny, and like a lot of people I thought the updated theme song was horrible (I happen to actually like Fall Out Boy, but good grief that was bad). After seeing it, I can safely say my first impressions were mostly spot on. It's pretty sad when one of the funniest lines is a character smacking the heck out of another shouting "THE POWER OF PATTY COMPELS YOU!". For about 2/3 of the movie I sat there constantly thinking "who actually thinks this is funny?" Not only that, but the chemistry between the cast was bad. For a brief moment I thought I was watching a bad SNL skit instead of a feature movie. Actually...scratch that. It was more like an old episode of Scooby Doo. I half expected one of the ghosts to be caught and claim they would've gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling Ghostbusters. Either that or see Shaggy run across the screen yelling "Zoinks! Oh, we're in for it now Scoob!"

Now, to be fair, it wasn't entirely horrible. I did enjoy the action, with the final showdown between the Ghostbusters and the ghosts of New York being a pretty cool sequence. Towards the end the comedy began to be a bit more natural and legitimately funny. Leslie Jones as Patty had a lot of the funniest lines throughout the movie. It wasn't enough to save the movie, but it's not the worst movie I've ever seen either.

In the end, I would honestly say if you're looking for 2 hours to kill with nothing else to watch on Netflix or Redbox, then...eh, you could do much worse than this. Otherwise, these aren't the Ghostbusters you want to call if there's something strange in your neighborhood.