Ghostbusters (2016) Review

Warning: The following review contains politically incorrect material, which SJWs would obviously find triggering. Viower excretion advisd Viewer discretion is advised.

Now that’s out of the way, I have to make another pre-review note. I was not an 80s kid; I did not grow up with the original Ghostbusters, I didn’t watch any of the cartoons from that franchise, or play any of the games, I only saw the original 1984 movie once in school, and that was a years ago, so I don’t know much about the franchise aside from the very basics. I won't be comparing this to the original, I will judge it by its own merits (or rather lack of them). 

 But I don’t need to be a Ghostbusters expert to know this movie was shit.

To be honest, when I first heard the news that they were doing a gender-flipped reboot of Ghostbusters, I knew it wouldn't be good, because I knew they would, as MrEnter said "put [identity] politics before character," and we all know how well that worked with Rey, the Mary Sue from the Force Awakens (who pulled up the Jedi mind trick out of nowhere, knew Han Solo's ship better than Han Solo and beat Kylo Ren in a duel despite the fact she'd never even fought with a lightsaber) and Tauriel, the canon raping ginger Sue from the Hobbit movies.

Come March of 2016, when the trailer came out, it was worse than I thought, in addition to what I just mentioned, there were also unfunny jokes (like the “that [slime] got everywhere, in every crack…very hard to wash off” one, I’m not sure if they were trying to make you laugh, cringe or feel all squicked out), inexcusably bad CGI (did I mention they had a budget of $144 million? You wouldn’t know that from just watching this; you’d think this was made in the early to mid 2000s, I even heard people say the CGI was like something out of the live-action Scooby Doo movies), and Leslie Jones, the fat, unfunny, sassy black woman stereotype who only exists because “muh diversity.” It was then I thought “holy shit…this could be the worst movie of 2016,” and I wasn't the only one who thought that, everyone who saw the trailer who wasn't an SJW thought the same thing (and that really riled up the SJWs and the politically correct mainstream press, naturally they played the usual sexism card, even the movie's cast and crew).

But because I've been lied to by trailers before (yes Adjustment Bureau trailer, I'm talking about you, you led me to believe it was going to be an action film, it was actually more of a romance/drama with some action but not enough), I knew back then they could be deliberately amping up the “so bad you have to see it for the trainwreck” factor to sell more tickets, and instead of being horrifically bad, it’d just be bad.

It was actually somewhere between bad and horrifically bad; it’s not on the same level as say…The Room, there wasn’t enough unintentional comedy (or narm as TV Tropes calls it) for that, yet it hasn’t reached that level of horribad, where you have to see it to believe it (if you want a movie with four female protagonists which has reached that level, you’re much better off watching the 2007 live-action Bratz movie), so it’s just lingering on the IMDB worst reboots list, between reboots are bad but still watchable like Clash of the Titans (2010) to reboots so awful you wonder why even exist, like Psycho (1998).

It opens with someone giving a tour at an old, 19^th century New York house, and he’s telling them all about a man who imprisoned his mad daughter in a small windowless room until she died. All of a sudden, something falls off the table that's a few feet away the room she died in (I think a fancy pen fell off from its fancy holder), and everyone rushes out, before the guy reveals he made it fall with a remote control. Then he hears an actual knocking sound coming from the room, so he tries to leave, but the doorknob to the front door’s so hot (it’s like this scene from Home Alone where one of the robbers touch the doorknob and it’s so hot it burns his hand), so he tries to look for an alternate exit, but he ends up in the basement instead and encounters this ghost.

Aaaand then we switch to the logo, opening theme and another scene with Erin who looks and acts like the frumpy, ugly, dorky girl that gets a makeover in every single rom-com ever made. She’s played by Kristen Wiig, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything starring her, then again, that’s the case for all the other lead actresses, until now I’ve never seen anything starring Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon or Leslie Jones, if this is any indication of what they're like, I don’t want to watch any movie starring them again, because none of them were funny. Now, the director of this film, Paul Feig, or Paul Fag as some people call him would cry “muh soggy knees” at this, but he can shove it up his ass, I’ve seen tons of funny women on MADtv (the politically incorrect, much better alternative to Saturday Night Live)—Stephanie Weir, Crista Flanagan, Nicole Parker, Mo Collins, Debra Wilson. This movie isn’t unfunny because it stars women, it’s just shit. Anyways, Erin’s getting ready for a lecture at the prestigious university she works at, when another guy approaches her for a book she co-authored years ago with Abby (played by Melissa McCarthy) about actual ghosts. She tries to deny it, but he believes her. Embarrassed, she goes to her office, does a Google search and finds several copies of the book, when some guy played by Charles Dance (yes, that Charles Dance, the guy who played Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones) walks in and talks about how much of a shame it would be if their prestigious institution had to fire her if something shameful and cringeworthy from her past turned up. Just look at that "subtle" foreshadowing.

If someone put a gun to my head and told me in order to live, I had to say something I genuinely liked about the movie, I’d say it’s Charles Dance, his character’s a lot like Tywin Lannister, his mannerisms are almost exactly like Tywin’s—he’s this uptight, intimidating, no nonsense guy who cares more about reputation than anything else, and he won’t hesitate to cut you out of his life if you make him look bad. The best thing in this movie for me was a character played by an actor I like that reminded me of a Game of Thrones character I miss, even though he was fighting for the other side.

Upon hearing that, Erin confronts her old friend Abby, who looks like the movie’s prime target audience with her SJW problem glasses and her fat rolls, all that’s missing are facial piercings and neon coloured hair dye. She finds out her friend’s still doing the ghost hunting thing, only now she has a new partner, Holtzmann (played by Kate McKinnon). Holtzmann looks like a lesbian (the butch sort), and when I saw the trailer, I assumed she was one from her mannerisms, but now that I’ve seen the entire movie, I’d say she’s meant to cater to the quirky side of Tumblr that thrives on le random humour, the side of Tumblr that gives everyone PTSD flashbacks to the Internet of the 2000s where everyone tried so hard to be “lol so random xD xD.”

Abby and Holtzmann are convinced they’re onto something, and they even make Erin listen to one recording they have of a ghost, during which Holtzmann says something like “oops, I farted,” then a second later, she adds “oh…that didn’t come from behind.” Yup…the first sorry excuse for a joke in this movie is about queefing. That’s just one of the many unfunny lines you’ll hear.

*sigh*

This is gonna be a long movie.

Abby and Holtzmann convince Erin to go to the old mansion from the opening scene, where the guy scamming the tourists with the fake haunted pen and his boss are waiting, and the latter’s mocking the former about how he pissed his pants during his encounter with the ghost. Yes, more low-effort, unfunny jokes. They go into the mansion, they have their cameras out, and they manage to get footage of the ghost puking slime on Erin, the very same slime that “got in every crack” and was “very hard to wash off.” After seeing the ghost, Erin starts jumping up and down about how “ghosts are real!” and she believes in them. They videotape that too, and it somehow ends up on YouTube, Tywin Lannister (yes, I’m calling him that) sees it and fires her, so now that she’s out of a job, she starts working with Abby and Holtzmann. Then there's a joke where they try to do a call back to the original movie; Abby says something like “someone has to deal with these ghosts, who else are they gonna call?” and at that second, as if it’s on cue, the TV in their show starts playing a theme song to some show where some kid yells “Ghost Jumpers!” and Abby sighs about how no one takes them seriously because of “those frauds” on TV.

Well…I’d rather call Danny Phantom (you just know if there’s ghosts on the loose, he’s gonna catch them all), Dean and Sam Winchester, or Ed and Lorraine Warren (from the Conjuring movies), anyone but these guys. While they’re setting up their business above the Chinese restaurant Abby always eats at, Leslie Jones’ character Patty the token black—who only exists because god forbid your movie has a homogeneous cast, you gotta shove a token minority in there, even if it’s done in the sloppiest, laziest, most cliché way ever—she’s working at the NYC subway as a token collector, when this fat, dorky-looking guy who's muttering about how everything’s gonna end soon comes up, and she follows him into a subway tunnel. She’s walking on the subway tracks, and I thought it made her look suicidal (as you will see later, those are still in use), a train can come any minute, yet she's still willing to go down there, without any consideration for how she could easily end up as a bloody mess on the tracks. Anyways she sees a ghost, and high tails it out of there.

Abby, Erin and Holtzmann manage to hire a secretary, Kevin. I don’t know how they managed to get Chris Hemsworth to do this movie, I assume some kind of blackmail was involved. His entire shtick is that he’s hawt but stupid. It’s unfunny, and it gets old fast, but I know the fat, facially pierced, hairy, feminists are praising this as something “so progressive” that totally single handedly smashed the eeeeeevil white western patriarchy, because you see, instead of having a hot but dumb female secretary, they have a hot but dumb male secretary.

Just imagine their outrage if it was a movie with a hot but dumb female secretary, and she was played by say…Megan Fox, and she only existed to be eye candy. Their reaction isn’t much of a surprise, I always say that if feminists didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have standards. I should also say that in the original Ghostbusters, the secretary Janine wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t eye candy either, so why’d they take that approach with Kevin? Oh yes...gotta have "muh girl power" by dumbing down the guys. Brilliant, just brilliant.

Patty (though some on Twitter may call her Harambe) also joins them, because “she knows New York.” In other words, she’s a human version of Google Maps, with a little bit of Wikipedia sprinkled in there. But they don’t dare say no to her, because they don’t wanna be called racist, and in the current year, racist is the worst thing you can be called, according to the current mindset, so you have to accept and tolerate all sorts of shit to prove you’re not a "racist redneck." That’s exactly what they do, they let her join, even though her shtick is the fat, loud, sassy black woman, it’s just as unfunny as Kevin being hot but dumb and it gets old just as fast. They start with some weapons testing, and they go back to the subway tunnel, which proves to be still active, when Erin’s nearly run over by a train (for a couple of scientists, these people sure look like contenders for a Darwin Award). She was testing a proton pack, but she didn’t get that ghost.

There’s also a subplot where some of their work gets uploaded onto YouTube and no one likes it, I was told Paul Feig added that scene when he found out about how much dislikes the trailer got, so he made a scene that shouted “take that!” to the critics and edited it into the movie. Jesus Christ, this is like the professional equivalent of a ten year old getting back at her critics for leaving her bad reviews of her Mary Sue fanfiction by putting them into the story and then violently killing them off while telling them about how much they suck. The only difference here is that Paul Feig has been making movies for years, and you think he’d be able to take criticism.

They continue their work, Patty manages to get a Cadillac hearse they can use, and their work brings them to a theatre.

Fun fact: Michael Mcdonald of MADtv plays the manager there, and when I saw him I was like “really?” because this movie doesn’t showcase his talent at all, Michael Mcdonald’s funny as hell, just watch some of his MADtv sketches; he deserves better than Ghostbusters.

And it’s here where they encounter a gargoyle ghost, and Patty jumps into a crowd, but no one catches her, and she falls onto the cold, hard, floor. Then she asks “if it’s a race thing, or a lady thing, but [she’s] mad as hell.” It’s a perfect representation of the crew and their SJW fanbase’s reaction to everyone who didn’t like the movie—if you hate it you’re a racist misogynist. It's gotten to the point where the Angry Video Game Nerd was called misogynist when he said he wouldn't review this movie, and someone on Twitter got banned over a bad Ghostbusters review. Oh god, I hope nothing happens to me.

They manage to trap the ghost in this thing…I don’t know what it is, but you know how Danny Phantom captures ghosts and then he puts them in this thermos? It’s like that but much bigger. This brings them more attention then ever, even though this one guy on the news (played by Bill Murray of the original movie) thinks they’re full of shit. The mayor, however believes them, but he wants to suppress the truth because he doesn’t want the city to panic.

Then, Bill Murray’s character visits them in their workplace, demanding proof, and Erin lets the ghost out, and said ghost throws him out the window.  

Somewhere along the line, there’s a scene of Rowan, the fat, dorky-looking guy from the subway station, (we know he’s already planning a ghost apocalypse) sitting in a diner, and he’s muttering something about how life as they know it will end, and soon everyone who bullied him will be bullied by him. He establishes himself as this beta male; life has not been kind to him, and he’s going to lash out at everyone who picked on him. This is the villain, and he’s not even cool, badass, threatening (and that's particularly bad, since a villain needs to be threatening to make his moment of defeat that much sweeter) or manipulative on the same level as Varys or Littlefinger, nor does he operate on a philosophy that makes you stop and think “huh…he could be right” like Jigsaw from the Saw movies who tests your will to live with his traps, even his motive of getting back at everyone is very underdeveloped.

Because I know jack shit about him, my reaction to him is just meh, and if I'm to feel anything else, I need more information on him, specifically concerning his past—was he picked on from an early age? if so, what did they pick on him for? what were the worst things they did to him that stick out, even after all these years? did it escalate as he grew older? did he ever befriend or come close to befriending maybe another outcast at school? how did he end up as a janitor? how was being picked on at work different from being picked on at school? what was the final straw that made him snap?

Now I’ve heard people say that he’s the representation of everyone who hated the trailer, because the only people who hated it were clearly all fat beta man babies. I agree with them completely. Now I’d say that Paul Feig and his crew deliberately left his past blank aside from “he was everyone’s punching bag,” because they didn’t want him coming off as too sympathetic, that's why they didn't delve deeper into his character. But that would imply they can be competent writers. No, I think their train of thought as they created him were “hey, let’s make the male villain a total loser, that way, it’d really empower our women protagonists, and reflect on how pro-women and progressive we, the production team are!” What I find extremely ironic about all this is that, for a bunch of people so keen on empowering women, their acts reinforced the notion men are so OP that women can’t possibly compete on the same level, unless you nerf, or dumb down the men first.

The Ghostbusters figure out his plan to bring ghosts from a ghost dimension using this portal that’s located at the basement of this hotel that’s filled with paranormal activity. Like I said, I know very little about the original, so I have to ask, did the ghost dimension and the ghost portal exist in the 1984 version? If not, they’re just ripping off Danny Phantom.

They track him down, but rather than be captured, he “turns into a ghost,” aka he kills himself, and it looks like their work’s done, but then Erin spots her book on his shelf, she grabs it, flips through it, and finds his drawings all over it. Turns out, killing himself was a part of his plan. Meanwhile at the Ghostbusters HQ, Abbys turns on the tap, and instead of water, slime comes out, and it’s actually Rowan, he possesses Abby and she tries to throw Holtzmann out the window. Sadly, it doesn’t work, because Patty comes and slaps the Rowan out of her, and then she tries too hard to be funny with a reference to The Exorcist—“the power of pain compels you!”

Just then Kevin’s outside, and Rowan enters him (pun intended). Rowan/Kevin, or Rovin as I like to call it, goes to the hotel basement, beats up the cops guarding it, and then he lets all the ghosts out. All hell breaks loose as people panic, and the ghosts wreck havoc on the city. Two of the ghosts that really stand out are Slimer and this one really tall guy in a pinstripe suit that made me pause and wonder “wait a minute, is that Jack Skellington?”

The police and the army guys come and they try to shoot the ghosts, but it’s not very effective, for what is dead may never die. But the feminazi Ghostbusters save the day, without much effort; they capture all the ghosts, upon seeing that, Rowan pulls out of Kevin’s body, and he turns into a giant version of the ghost from the Ghostbusters logo, and he starts destroying the city. Ok, any time something giant starts wreaking havoc on a city or town or something like that, I think I’m obligated to play this music.

Being the strong, independent, one dimensional, unfunny female characters they are, they defeat the giant ghost, and yes, I’m sure you’ve heard of how it ends—they shoot him in the crotch. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that all the guys in this movie are stupid, evil, incompetent, unlikable, or at the very least they serve as obstacles for the female heroes to overcome, and Paul Feig and his crew and the mainstream press and the SJWs think by making the men stupid, they're making the women look better by comparison. We all know that's not how you write, you don't need to sacrifice one gender to make the other look better, but that's one of the problems of putting ideology before story and character.  You see, when you don't separate politics and storytelling, and you're writing to promote and ideology, your first priority will be “ok, what can I do to make my ideology look good and my opponents look bad” as opposed to “what can I do to make the story better?” That's not a good thing, because you're limiting yourself, to what makes your ideology look good, even if it derails the story and vice versa, you can't use tropes that'd make your ideology look bad even if it'd improve the story. Case in point, Kevin. The story would be so much better if he'd been useful or competent in addition to being eye candy, but we couldn't have that because such a character wouldn't fit the Tumblr feminist narrative, so instead we got an unfunny running gag.

Anyways, they manage to get the giant ghost back into the ghost dimension and close the portal, I’ll spare you the technical babble, but the ghost tries to drag Abby to the ghost dimension, but Erin gets her out, and the trip for some reason, turns both of their hair white. After that, the city’s saved, they dye their hair back to their normal colours, the mayor secretly starts funding them, they move into an old firehouse. Whoop de fucking doo.

I'm glad that was over.

Oh, and there’s a post-credits scene, a sequel hook if you will, (of Patty listening to a recording and asking who Zuul is), because these people think they’re Marvel Studios, and they’re delusional enough to believe this will get a sequel. As of now, the movie still hasn’t made back its budget of $144 million, and if it does break even, I doubt there will be a sequel, because all reviews so far have been bad, except when the reviewers are social justice warriors, white knights, or paid shills. If you take all these guys out, no one liked this movie, so even if it does somehow make a profit, it’s not getting a sequel. Profits doesn’t mean sequels, look at Spiderman 3, it made $890 million on a $258 million budget, and because of the bad reviews it got, they rebooted it, instead of making Spiderman 4.

But let’s not worry about profit vs. reviews, we’re not going to get there, this movie’s not going to make a lot of money, proving once again that putting politics before plot and character is a bad move, and insulting your viewers and calling them sexist when they see it for the piece if shit it is, is an even worse one.

This joke of a franchise will die off. It only exists because feminists insist that your favourite forms of entertainment (be it movies, games, TV shows, cartoons etc.) are sexist/racist/homophobic/whatever-ist, unless there’s a # FatAndProud woman, transvestite midget, loud black lesbian, some handicappable in a wheelchair, and an attack helicopter in it, and everyone's very, very sick of of being told that same shit over and over again (and if they don't agree, they're part of the problem). People are tired of SJWs policing what you watch, play, say, wear, etc. The movement that's  taken over the press, the news, college campuses, most of the entertainment industry (they already have comics, movies, TV shows and cartoons, only the gamers are fighting back), and depending on where you live, the way the government operates (yes, Justin “Muh Current Year” Trudeau, I’m looking at you) is dying, I see more and more people speaking out against it, in my own life and elsewhere. Anti-SJWs online and offline have been getting more popular than ever, companies that refuse to cater to SJWs get a huge rise in profits (remember those ads Protein World wouldn't pull? they made millions overnight), while anything that kowtows to them sees a dip in profits (this movie for one, plus the entire comic industry). SJWism is falling apart and it will die “as we say on the Internet, in its final form,” this movie will be buried six feet underground beside it.