'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' Stinks Like a Rotting Corpse

Did people seriously enjoy this nonsense?

Because Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is coming out this weekend, and because I haven’t watched Ghostbusters: Afterlife since it was in theaters, I decided to revisit the latter movie in advance of seeing the former movie. This was a huge mistake on my part, at least in terms of my mental well-being, but I’m going to write about this garbage anyway.

There are more than a few franchises that do not deserve to be franchises. By this, I mean that, once upon a time, someone made a really, really good movie, and greedy rights holders have been making sequels ever since, and the sequels are always, without fail, bad.

Ghostbusters is one such franchise.

The original movie, released in 1984, is an indisputable classic of the comedic slobs versus snobs genre (and if you somehow don’t understand what the slobs versus snobs genre is, watch this incredible scene from the movie, which lays it out pretty clearly). The first sequel, Ghostbusters II, came out five years later, and while it has its charms, it’s basically just an inferior remake of the original. Then the franchise lay mercifully dead until 2016, when Paul Feig made a horrible, gender-swapped remake/reboot with a great cast.

The 2016 Ghostbusters - since retitled Ghostbusters: Answer the Call for marketing purposes - wasn’t well-received. Some would blame this on misogyny (a lot of dipshits on social media were upset that the titular heroes were now all played by women), but the truth is, it’s just a bad movie. The reasons it doesn’t work are myriad, but perhaps best summed up by this excellent criticism from the inimitable Mr. Plinkett:

Sony’s next stab at wringing more money out of what should have been a one-and-done outing arrived in the form of 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife. I’m not sure if Afterlife is worse than the 2016 Ghostbusters, but it’s certainly more despicable.

Afterlife was directed and co-written by Jason Reitman. On the one hand, Jason Reitman seemed like an obvious choice to take over the series, because his dad was Ivan Reitman, the Slovakian-born director who helmed the original two films in the franchise, as well as beloved comedies from the same era, like Stripes, Dave, and Kindergarten Cop (Ivan passed away in 2023, just a few months after Afterlife was released). On the other hand, the younger Reitman is most well-known for small films that range from funny-ish (Juno, Young Adult) to not-very-funny-at-all (Up in the Air, Labor Day), so he wasn’t necessarily the logical pick to oversee a slobs versus snobs comedy.

This being the case, it is not exactly shocking that Ghostbusters: Afterlife is NOT a slobs versus snobs comedy. In fact, it’s not really a comedy at all, so much as it’s a kids’ adventure film peppered with some comedic moments, much more akin to something like Explorers, Flight of the Navigator, or even The Last Starfighter than Ghostbusters or any of the many films Ghostbusters influenced (Men in Black, Pixels, R.I.P.D., Ivan Reitman’s own Evolution, etc.).

That’s not Afterlife’s greatest offense - I can imagine a world in which someone made an unfunny Ghostbusters movie that was still pretty good - but it is a problem for this particular film, in part because a) no one bothered to tell co-star Paul Rudd he’s not in a comedy, which gives the flick some serious tonal whiplash (especially when he’s paired with Carrie Coon’s character - more on that later), and b) it is LOUSY with references to the original Ghostbusters, which is bound to make the viewer think about all the laughs they’re not currently enjoying.

No, Afterlife’s biggest offense, without question, is the way it desecrates the corpse of the great Harold Ramis, who co-starred in and co-wrote the first two Ghostbusters movies (a true comedy icon, he also directed and co-wrote Caddyshack and Groundhog Day, directed National Lampoon’s Vacation, and co-wrote Stripes). To borrow imagery the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait once used to describe the media’s relationship with Kurt Cobain, an apt poster for Ghostbusters: Afterlife would have been Jason Reitman feasting on Ramis’ decaying flesh while cash flies out of his ass.

But truthfully, the movie has major issues even before it gets around to shitting on Ramis’ grave.

The premise of Afterlife, for those of you who have been wise enough to avoid it for the past three years, is that OG Ghostbuster Egon Spengler (Ramis) dies and leaves his rundown farm in Oklahoma to his estranged daughter, Callie (Coon), and her kids, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace). Because Callie is broke and the trio is being evicted from their apartment anyway, they move into the house, where Phoebe and Trevor begin to discover their grandfather’s past haunting spectral entities while Callie starts a romance with a local teacher, Gary (Rudd). And then of course it turns out that Egon was living in rural Oklahoma because he was trying to combat some particularly nasty apparitions, and then of COURSE it turns out those apparitions are directly related to the ones from the original Ghostbusters, and so Phoebe and Trevor and their new friends become kiddie Ghostbusters, thus ensuring the franchise can continue for decades to come or until audiences finally stop paying to see these movies, whichever comes first.

Afterlife stops making sense pretty much the moment it begins. Like Ghostbusters II, the filmmakers have inexplicably opted to set their movie in a world where the events of Ghostbusters had no appreciable impact on science or society. A 100-foot-tall marshmallow man walked along Fifth Avenue, and that somehow didn’t change the course of history forever; in fact, no one under the age of 40 seems to be aware that it even happened. Given her contentious relationship with her father, I buy Callie not telling Phoebe and Trevor that Egon was their granddad, but it is next-level insane to suggest that none of these kids have any idea that the events of the first movie occurred. Even if you point to all the real-world conspiracy theorists who make wild claims along the lines of “9/11 didn’t happen” or “the moon landing wasn’t real,” you have to consider that we also have real-world scientists who come forth and say, “Those assertions are nuts.” There is simply no reality in which the final twenty minutes of Ghostbusters would not mark a major paradigm shift in human history. Scores of New Yorkers saw proof of the supernatural with their own eyes, and it didn’t make it into any school history books? Does this movie take place in an America where Ron DeSantis is president or something?

Just as confounding is the explanation for how Egon wound up in a small town in Oklahoma, alone: he discovered that Ivo Shandor - the creep who built the haunted building from the ‘84 film in which Dana (Sigourney Weaver) lives - had built said town and made a temple to summon the evil Sumerian god, Gozer (the movie never explains why Shandor also needed to build a Manhattan high-rise for that same purpose). And even though Shandor’s name is stamped on half the buildings in that town, he wasn’t able to convince his fellow Ghostbusters that there was any kind of threat. HUH? How is that possible? Wouldn’t they all join him the second they heard the name ‘Shandor’???

Maybe everyone in this movie is meant to have suffered a serious head injury: there’s a sequence about halfway through where Phoebe, Trevor, and Phoebe’s new friend, Podcast (JESUS CHRIST) tear through town chasing a ghost, doing thousands of dollars of property damage in the process, and not only do the local cops let them off with a warning, BUT NO ONE ELSE IN TOWN SEES THE GODDAMN GHOST. In 2021. When everyone has cameras on their phones and is documenting every aspect of their life, all the time, always. In fact, the ghost flies right past Callie and Gary, and even they don’t seem to see it. What. The actual. Fuck?

(An ever-so-slightly less-aggravating example of how the script assumes the viewer to be an idiot is that Ray Stantz, once again played by Dan Aykroyd, tells Phoebe that the Ghostbusters’ old firehouse has been turned into a Starbucks… even though when we see it in a later scene, it is still very much a firehouse.)

Asking the audience to go along with the conceit that Ghostbusters somehow transpired in a vacuum is all the more grating because, as is so often the case with so-called “legacy” sequels (read: sequels made a bajillion years after the original), Afterlife can’t go more than thirty seconds without a nonsensical reference to the original movie. The big bad is, once again, Gozer (this time played, rather distractingly, by Olivia Wilde). That means the Terror Dogs are back, too… and if you think Reitman and his co-writer, Gil Keenan, had the restraint not to include a variation of the line “There is no Dana, only Zuul,” check with your doctor, ‘cause you may need an MRI.

Speaking of which: the weird brain-monitor thing Egon makes Louis (Rick Moranis) wear in the original Ghostbusters also pops up for no discernible reason. Additionally, there’s a large stack of books in Egon’s home, lest we forget that Ghostbusters had a scene with a large stack of books. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is back, too (yes, one character winds up covered in melted marshmallow), as is Shandor (J.K. Simmons plays him here, for roughly ten seconds).

Afterlife might have managed to transcend these ridiculous details if it had any decent characters, but it doesn’t. Phoebe, who is both highly intelligent and socially inept, is sort of interesting, but Trevor has no real character traits other than being a wiseass, and Callie… I mean… she’s just a lousy mom. We don’t know how she managed to lose the family’s apartment beyond a throwaway line about she’s “bad with money,” but even putting that aside, she’s not very nice to her kids (her advice to Phoebe before the child’s first day of school: “Don’t be yourself.”). She’s perpetually grumpy and misanthropic and seems to have wandered in from one of Reitman’s more dramatic character studies. The role is a tragic waste of Coon’s talents (at least she and her husband, the great American playwright Tracy Letts, made some money off this thing - Letts pops up briefly as a local hardware store clerk). As for Paul Rudd, well… like I said, the poor dude appears to be in a different movie from everyone else. I appreciate his efforts to lighten things up, but he’s almost as wasted as Coon. None of the other new characters are any good, either, be it Trevor’s bland love interest (Celeste O'Connor from Madame Web) or the aforementioned Podcast (Logan Kim… and did I mention how dumb it is to have a character named ‘Podcast’?).

The original Ghostbusters - Ray, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Winston Zeddmore (Ernie Hudson), and even Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) - all get shoehorned into the story, too, natch, and it’s seriously jarring because, like Rudd, they’re clearly under the mistaken belief that they’re in a comedy.

But they’re still not as jarring as the CGI Egon who shows up for a sickeningly-saccharine moment right at the end of the movie.

When I saw this scene in theaters, I managed to restrain myself from throwing my soda at the screen… but when the words “For Harold” appeared at the very end, I did loudly instruct the film to self-copulate. No one familiar with Ramis’ body of work, which so strenuously avoided sentimentality, can truly believe he would have wanted this. Ramis was an iconoclast, and this is corporate greed at its most cynical; it spits in the face of everything for which he stood.

Now that I’ve spent nearly 2,000 words trashing Ghostbusters: Afterlife, I’ll concede that there are two aspects of the film that I appreciate.

The first is Eric Steelberg’s cinematography. Frequently shot in wide open fields at magic hour, Afterlife often looks goddamn gorgeous. If it had been a 30-second ad for Levi’s, I’d be all in.

The second is a post-credits scene that reunites Murray with Weaver. Yes, it has yet another stupid callback to the original movie, but the chemistry between Murray and Weaver remains palpable, and the tone is much, much closer to what Afterlife should have been. Someone should just write these two a romantic comedy in which to co-star. Just don’t let Jason Reitman direct it.