Halloween Week: Ghostbusters 2 movie review

Here's what you need to know; after half a decade of mockery and irrelevance, the Ghostbusters have gradually gone their separate ways and accepted the fact that Ghostbusters is never coming back. That is until a strange occurrence befalls an old friend of theirs, and a series of spectral peculiarities lead them to believe that another catastrophe is on the horizon, forcing Peter, Ray, Egon and Winston to once again take up arms against the supernatural and bring their business back from the dead.
Ghostbusters 2, at least there'll be no confusion with this one since there's never going to be another Ghostbusters 2, in fact Ghostbusters probably isn't coming back for another decade and a half, but fuck it, at least there's two good ones, though is the sequel as good as the first, is it even good at all, that is the question.


Ghostbusters 2, like the first, opens with a spooky encounter, one that this time sees Dana almost lose her kid to New York traffic, oh yeah, Dana has a kid now. That is one of the things that detracts from the film in its opening act, apparently a lot has happened since the Ghostbusters defeated Gozer, the big one being that now everyone in New York thinks they're fake, which doesn't exactly make sense given that everyone in New York saw the sky turn black and them blow up a walking building's worth of Marshmallow. It doesn't end up distracting from the film as a whole in the long run, but it is initially distracting that the Ghostbusters are now so arbitrarily discredited, as if for the sake of the narrative, since a part of this film is them all coming back together. That being said, it is a little interesting seeing where they all ended up; Peter landed a crappy TV talk show, Egon went back to science and Ray opened a book store while doing everything he can to keep the Ghostbusters brand alive. Like the first film, all the Ghostbusters are really likable and funny, Venkman's still a snarky Womanizer, though he now acts even more childish and immature, Egon's still an oblivious autistic genius, Ray's still an obsessive man-child, and Winston's still the normie. The lack of any real change or growth from the first film could be an issue, but it ends up being irrelevant because they are once again the most likable crew in the existence. The biggest change in character from the previous film is in Venkman's relationship to Dana and Oscar, because apparently Dana and Peter broke up, Dana got married, had a kid, and then got ditched by her husband all the in the span of five years, jinkies. Peter and Oscar have some really funny bits together, and the three of them are where the film's surprising amount of heart lie, as Dana and Peter inevitably fall back in love while Peter keeps her and Oscar safe from the clutches of evil. Ghostbusters 2 doesn't make any huge changes to its central characters from the last film, but it never needed to because if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

That being said, some things in the first film were in need of little work in my opinion, and in the sequel, they need a lot of work. I refer to Louis and Janine, Janine now looks like a cartoon character, in fact she now more resembles her Real Ghostbusters counterpart, so it does kind of make sense. And while it was implied that she had a thing for Egon in the first film, this film makes no effort to hide her lust for, of all people, Louis Tully, an interesting pairing to say the least. Louis is still a character I don't understand the point of, his awkwardness and stupidity are more annoying than they are funny, but he's even more relevant in the sequel through being the Ghostbusters' lawyer, the object of Janine's desire, and in the film's finale, a threat to New York, running around with a proton pack that, realistically, he's far too incompetent to be trusted with. But he has competition for his weirdness in the sequel thanks to Vigo's minion, who I didn't find funny at all, and maybe it's the point, but I found him rather pathetic, a spineless little goblin of a man that almost seems like a counterbalance to Vigo, who makes Gozer look like the ghosts from Casper in comparison; for most of the film he's just a creepy painting, but he is such a creepy painting that it has presence in every scene it's in, and while he's over the top when he speaks initially, in the film's finale when he physically manifests, he is terrifying, the visuals, make up and sound on Vigo are top notch, and he is a creepy fucker, no big cuddly marshmallows in this film. This comes with a bit of a contradiction however as Ghostbusters 2 is at once the less scary and scarier of the two films, as little sense as that makes.

There's a more cartoony nature to a lot of its elements this time, yet some of the imagery is nightmarish, Vigo, the ghost train, the room full of severed heads, the monsters of the film are more creatively designed and some of them are really creepy, and the river of slime running under New York is a very unsettling concept once you consider that the slime feeds on negative energy, minus the cheesy inverse of the slime also feeding on positive energy, which becomes important in the film's finale. While certainly being scarier than the first, the two films are about on par for comedy, which is to say they're both really fun and really funny, once again, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. This film's also on par in visual effects, though the effects have changed somewhat with the ghosts becoming more cartoonish in their design, their presentation is still strong. I'm sure me saying if it ain't broke is getting old now, that maybe I'm too dismissive of this film's lack of evolution from the first, but the biggest offender in this regard is the story and narrative structure, which is practically identical to the first, all the shit that Ghostbusters 2 is basically just Ghostbusters again is true, and if you ask me, that's excusably because if you're going to clone any movie, Ghostbusters would be a good choice, I can ignore the familiarity because this film doesn't stand out as inferior to the first, it has the exact same strengths and weaknesses, and while some of them are more pronounced in this film, they balance each other out in my opinion.

Two in the box, ready to go, we be fast and they be slow
Ghostbusters 2 really is more of the same, and I really don't care because it's still great. It's a film that there isn't really much to say about, its copy paste job of all of the first film's strengths was successful, ripoff or not, and it's still fantastically funny and light-hearted with fantastic visual effects and scary monsters, particularly a really creepy villain. Some of the first film's annoying elements were also carried over, and the sequel even adds some new ones, but overall, just like the first, I have a huge smile on my face for every minute of the film. Ghostbusters 2 is a good sequel, and it's definitely worth watching.