Ghostbusters Afterlife

Weird opinion cause I love Mister Paul Rudd and he was great in this but there were a couple of times where he came off kind of… I don’t know if smarmy is the right word… (Hell not sure it’s an actual word!) but it was just odd.

I mean I’m also not sure on the whole letting him teach summer school just cause he’s a scientist or Phoebe being enrolled in summer school for any reason but it’s Paul Rudd so I’ll let it go.

*Slightly spoiler below!

So yes I saw Ghostbusters Afterlife and while I enjoyed the film a great deal it hit me it’s never going to have the emotional pull of the originals and I just have to accept that.

And while I feel like there was a lot of retread of the first I still appreciated that it was a tighter script than Ghostbusters 2016.

Also Gozer looked great with the updates. Although I did admit I spent a lot of time going, who is that? Why does she look familiar?

FYI it’s Olivia Wilde!

But Afterlife really belongs to Phoebe (the excellent McKenna Grace) Egon’s granddaughter. She’s a bit of an outsider who moves to Summerville with her mom and brother because they are broke and evicted and grandpa’s old dirt farm is the only place to go.

Speaking of Egon…

They do provide a reason he’s estranged from his family and the other Ghostbusters. Does it work? Eh. I can buy it. They do the best they can with a lot of exposition considering Harold Ramis passed away.

And frankly I buy it a little more than the guy who once looked at one of the biggest monsters in the galaxy who he knew had recently tortured his friends and blown up a freaking planet and seeing some good in him one day looking at his sleeping nephew (who at that time hadn’t done anything) and saying nope, you got to die even for a second.

Where was I?

Oh another thing I appreciated about Afterlife was Callie (Carrie Coon) is allowed to be angry at her father and quiet cutting of him even around her kids.

Logan Kim is a lot of fun as Phoebe’s new friend Podcast (a role that could have been obnoxious in other hands but he makes it work) Trevor and Lucky have hardly anything to do. Loved seeing Annie Potts return as Janine but it kind of adds some confusion to the last years of Egon’s life and like why she couldn’t play go between with the other guys considering the world ending circumstances.

And I would have somehow liked a lot more Sigourney than we got. But when is that not the case?

In the end I enjoyed Ghostbusters Afterlife. I shed some tears and left with a big smile on my face. But I still felt like something was missing…

(Oh wait it might have been that moment in the finale where I realized that while Ghostbusters was part of my childhood I could easily be Trevor and Phoebe’s mother now. That time marches ever onward and doing these nostalgia baits is fun in the right mood until people start realizing you can’t recapture these things and you are only looking at the ghost of a moment in time that is getting further and further away.)

But excuse me I’ve been kind of grumpy and weird lately.

Recommend: Yes.

Yet I don’t think there’s any reason, unless you are a big Ghostbusters fan, or heck just looking for something to do with the family over the upcoming holidays that it can’t wait to stream.