Rating (1.5 out of 5)

Horrible remake.  The characters aren’t well structured.  The story is mediocre and there wasn’t really anything new, other than it was all women.

Plot:  After being fired from her teaching job Erin (Kristen Wiig) reunites with her high school friend Abby (Melissa McCarthy).  With the assistance of two other women, they create Ghostbusters and must stop Neil (Rowan North) from breaking the barrier to the spirit world.

What I Liked: The introduction of some new gear was good rather than just the particle beams .  To introduce the new toys they had mini training sessions, which were as close to a learning/growing montage as we got in the whole movie.

There was one scene where Erin is talking to her ex-boyfriend, a professor;Abby and Patty (Leslie Jones) were joking about how he danced.  This scene was the only part of the movie where I laughed.

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What I Didn’t Like:  The structure of the team was horrible.  There has to be an energy between the characters that then excites the audience and that just didn’t exist.   There was also not real leader or decision maker.  Bill Murray was definitely this in the original Ghostbusters and it helped with the overall tone of the team..  Jillian (Kate McKinnon) was supposed to be the cookie one but that never seemed quite to work for me.

Also, when you do a movie like this, make the bad guy bad.  Bad is pure evil.  Neil was a pathetic loser who wanted to take vengeance on the world for treating him poorly.  Sort of a bad guy who made a bad decision because he is a dork.  Not a well written bad guy.  Now Zuul from the original ghostbusters, they had a great folklore behind to make a very bad guy, and Zuul was pure evil.

Erin’s character specifically was odd to me.  A very smart scientist (we are led to believe), but never really seems to add a lot to the team, except complain.  Even the jokes that surround Erin’s character aren’t really fun.  Her character is rather pathetic.  For me, that isn’t what I want to see from a strong female lead.

I think they missed with Patty’s character knowing the history of New York, and where all history of New York.  The ghostbusters rise in popularity seems to be through YouTube.  They had one big bust at the rock concert, and then they were nabbed by Homeland Security.  That felt all rather rushed.  We didn’t get the success of capturing ghosts and being the toast of the town montage that we had from the first movie.  Something seemed missing.

The ghostbusters secretary (Chris Hemsworth) is stupid.  I don’t like it when they make female characters stupid this way, and didn’t appreciate it here.  There is a difference between ditzy and dumb.  They went for dumb, which is more sad than funny.  If they had gone for ditzy, then that would have been better.

Conclusion:  This is crap on a stick.   No chemistry, no laughs.  There isn’t really much more to say about it.