I Ain't Entertained By No Ghost: a review of the Ghostbusters remake

  

Remakes of good films are unnecessary. By their very definition they are designed to be money makers, riding the memories of a good, successful film all the way to the bank.  The number of sub-standard remakes of good films by far outweighs the good ones.  For every The Departed, Dawn Of The Dead or Ocean’s 11 there are several turkeys: Robocop, Total Recall, Point Break, The Wicker Man, Clash Of The Titans, Assault On Precinct 13, The Taking Of Pelham 123 to name but a few.  The 70s and 80s are the most fertile grounds from which studios plunder, and when they turn their attentions to something that was beloved, then can find themselves taking the brunt of the internet’s fury before a frame is filmed.

The Ghostbusters remake/reboot really shouldn’t have been controversial for any reason other than being surplus to demand.  The level of hyperbole-cum-outright abuse aimed at the film as soon as it was announced was shocking given that the reason for it wasn’t “don’t do this, it’s unnecessary”, it was “women can’t be Ghostbusters.” It’s 2016, FFS; grow up.

Ultimately the casting made sense once the decision was made to go all-female: Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are two of the world’s most popular comic actors (the latter somewhat inexplicably, but whatever…) and, much like the original’s Ernie Hudson and Harold Ramis, two relative unknowns in Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones make up the roster.  I would have pushed for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, but what do I know?

It opens well, with a decent premise and opening haunted house gambit.  Kristen Wiig’s trying-to-be-a-serious-physicist Erin Gilbert is reluctant and likeable as Wiig always is, but it’s soon sullied by the introduction of McCarthy’s believer/leader Abby Yates and McKinnon’s downright bizarre engineer Holtzmann.  They are both weak characters with too many throwaway lines, moments that don’t work, and gags that don’t land.  At one point it’s implied that Holtzmann is gay but, probably with thoughts of a 12A rating, this is never revisited.  This means we don’t get any unpleasant gently homophobic jokes, nor do we get any of the ‘heavy set women are funny’ gags that seem to have defined McCarthy’s career, but we don’t get much of value from either of them. McKinnon in particular doesn’t seem comfortable with a lot of her material.

Neither are as poor as Leslie Jones’ walking stereotype subway attendant and late joiner, whose dialogue is appalling throughout, save for one deadpan line delivered in a room full of broken mannequins.  Sadly, other than Wiig, the one saving grace is in Chris Hemsworth’s colossally stupid Kevin.  It’s a shame that in the female-led film, most of the laughs come from a man, but credit to Hemsworth who is brilliantly oblivious to how dense he is.  The few memorable moments in the film are his.

The script and plot recover the tropes you would hope to see in a Ghostbusters film: somebody awakens an ancient evil via a portal to elsewhere; there’s a bureaucratic mayor roadblocking our heroes (a game Andy Garcia, whose “don’t ever call me the Jaws mayor” is probably the best line; there’s a giant ‘thing’ trashing New York; and there’s slime aplenty.  What it doesn’t have is the two minor characters from the original: Rick Moranis’ sympathetic patsy, and Sigourney Weaver’s ‘normal’ character who grounds the whole shebang.  That the remake boasts neither leaves us with four lunatics spouting technobabble and shooting lasers at CGI for much of the narrative, so the whole endeavour feels hollow.

There are some funny moments, mostly from supporting characters and brief gracenotes: Karan Soni’s incompetent delivery man is fun (even if he’s playing the same role he played in Deadpool) and Zach Woods’ terrified tour guide delivers a line from The Exorcist in a nice nod.  One of the better moments comes when the characters scroll through an abusive list of internet comments and dismiss them; it’s a nice, meta touch and as confident as the film ever gets.

Less effective are the cameos which, rather than enhance a nostalgic experience, simply remind you that the original was a much better film.  Billy Murray’s paranormal sceptic is awful and makes you pine for his deadpan delivery in the main cast; Dan Ackroyd’s surly taxi driver delivers that line, Ernie Hudson turns up in a moment that should surprise nobody, and Annie Potts seems to have gone from an awful receptionist to an awful hotel desk clerk.  The Ozzy Osbourne cameo is just an embarrassment.  It feels like the film doesn’t believe in itself and needs these callbacks to validate its own existence.

Remakes are going to happen and there are two ways to get them somewhere approaching right: do something different but leave just enough of the original’s DNA to keep the fans on board (Evil Dead), or know that you’re covering old ground but commit to it (Star Trek Into Darkness knew damn well that it was covering Wrath Of Khan but went with it and enjoyed it). This does neither, and the problem with this slight, weightless and muddled remake is nothing to do with X chromosomes, but more to do with a poor script and a severe lack of confidence.

The Comic Book Bubble Part 2 - Suicide Squad's Self Destruction

One can’t help but feel that the D.C. cinematic universe, while still hugely successful, is stuttering.  Their twin tentpole characters’ throwdown, Batman vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice, derided in these very pages, threw both their biggest names and a hugely loaded name at audiences.  It turned out to be a glum, moody, largely un-dramatic piece of drama which managed to cram so much content and yet do so little in over two hours.  Following the flawed, muddled Man Of Steel, it didn’t exactly make a statement of intent for D.C’s plans.  Rather than jump straight into their Justice League main event, they’ve decided to go for something a little left field as a spacer.

The cynic in me says that this is their attempt to capitalise on the success of Guardians Of The Galaxy, which pitted a group of charming, mismatched anti-heroes against an actual bad guy.  Character friction, comedy and some genuinely new faces provided an interesting new jigsaw piece in Marvel’s expanding universe.  The irreverent tone, incongruous music and against-the-odds underdog story gave Marvel an unexpected hit.  Could the formula be replicated?

With Suicide Squad D.C/Warner have tried to introduce about a dozen new characters at once, the most familiar of which being one who carries perhaps the most baggage in The Joker.  The late Heath Ledger’s performance, amplified by the addition of the two words before his name, is now considered so definitive as to blow previously definitive performances by Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero out of the water. It couldn’t possibly be bested, could it?  Although, the film doesn’t give him a chance to prove it, I have no doubt that Jared Leto’s authoritative gangster will be brilliant if they give him something to do other than text and then rescue Magot Robbie’s Harley Quinn.  His inclusion reeks of a marketing decision, because D.C. didn’t have the guts to invest in unknown characters so they have hedged their bets and included their no.1 villain as a support act.

Harley Quinn is a tricky one; a potentially interesting arc between her and Joker is undercooked (possibly due to reshoots and studio-imposed cuts), but her anarchic spirit should give the film energy.  But because all of her best lines were in the trailers, she offers very little by way of surprises and in terms of skill set (agile, handy with a baseball bat), one has to wonder why the character would be recruited for ‘Task Force X’ to begin with.  Another great character wasted, although Robbie does well, undulating accent aside.

It’s perhaps natural that headline star Will Smith would steal the film as Deadshot, and while his character is at least given some background it is also lumbered with terrible sub-Bad Boys dialogue.  At one point, I expected him to describe a situation as ‘whack’; that he doesn’t is the only saving grace.  Jai Countney, normally as annoying as a genital rash, manages to raise some smiles with his Boomerang character, who otherwise has nothing to do. Jay Hernandez does good work with the repentant pyrokinetic El Diabolo and his brief back story should have been developed more, but doesn’t really do anything until about an hour in.  Joel Kinnaman, so good in House Of Cards, is a charisma void as team leader Rick Flagg, who tries to play straight man to Deadshot but comes off like a walking rectangle with a goatee.  Slipknot is a waste of space and gets less screen time than I’m giving him here.  Katana could have been great but isn’t given time to, and this leaves Enchantress, who starts off as a really interesting proposition but ends up as Cara Delevingne belly dancing in front of a huge CGI swirl.  None of whom are as bad as Killer Croc who does so little he’s barely worth mentioning.

Logically, then, why would America put together a team of bad guys? What could be so bad as to warrant such a move? The film provides some connective tissue and explains Superman’s post-Dawn Of Justice absence in one sentence within a montage.  Disappointingly, Enchantress turns out to be the main villain, which ironically would have been a good match for the vulnerable-to-magic Superman.  While her ‘spurned Aztec god’ angle is interesting, it boils down to a spur-of-the-moment decision to hate humanity and a devious plan which involves destroying all of the world’s military equipment (I can’t be the only person thinking that this was a good thing, can I?) with the aforementioned CGI swirl, which she calls a machine but is actually floating scrap metal not unlike the world engine from Man Of Steel. 

I’m not normally one to let plot holes ruin my films, but when the film drives directly into them I’ll make an exception.  The good guys win by detonating bombs near two gods who had previously been invincible.  The film betrays its own logic here and you feel cheated by it (the Incubus character had just regrown his own hand, but blow up the floor beneath him and he’s dead…).  In terms of power sets, only Diabolo and Killer Croc are particularly ‘powered’ so the final conflict boils down to 4 of the team being absolutely useless against superpowered enemies; anyone who’s been paying attention could work out how it pans out from a mile away.

The character dynamics are all wrong, too.  Over a post-defeat drink, they go from The Hateful Eight to The Breakfast Club, deciding that they’re family.  Deadshot’s toast to ‘honour among thieves’ comes off as patronising, it’s so obvious.  None of the characters are established well enough for us to believe that they would bond so easily over a couple of gunfights.  So the ensemble fails because we a) don’t know anything about the characters going in and b) aren’t given enough time with any of them to make us invest in them.

David Ayer makes some poor choices with the film as well, although rumour has it there has been studio tomfoolery at work soften the edges.  Starting with a pleasingly comic style (rap sheets up on screen in OTT fonts) while the characters are introduced, this is abandoned and settles down into standard military film tropes.  His set pieces are all very dark and muddled and because it’s characters you don’t especially care about shooting at lumpy CGI humanoids who have had no introduction, it’s really difficult to feel like there’s anything at stake during any of them. 

Most grating, though, are his musical choices.  Trying to capture the irreverent spirit (but none of the charm or charisma) of Guardians Of The Galaxy, seemingly incongruous songs actually become painfully obvious: ‘Sympathy Of The Devil’ plays when we first see El Diabolo, Eminem’s ‘Look Who’s Back’ plays as the team are tooling up, ‘House of The Rising Sun’ plays over the establishing shot of a Louisiana prison, and the opening line of Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ plays while Harley Quinn is released from her cell.  It’s overwhelming sensory overload and really quite distracting.

Finally, I can’t go without acknowledging that the entire end sequence is lifted from the finale of Ghostbusters (disappointingly, without marshmallow): team outmatched by a powerful witch with some ropey CGI magic somehow manages to beat her and then one character finds his girlfriend buried under the residue.

I’m not sure whether Suicide Squad is an opportunity missed or an idea half-cooked.  With the talent on board and the source material, it’s just such a shame that none of it managed to gel.  Next time, give The Joker something to do, eh?

The Comic Book Bubble Part 1 - The Trouble With Teamwork

The comic book movie bubble is expanding, and we all know what happens to bubbles when they finish expanding.  From 2002’s Spider-Man, or perhaps even earlier with 1998’s Blade, audiences have lapped up gloriously OTT tales of heroism and the impossible.  There have been lulls and duds, with the likes of Daredevil (2003), Ghost Rider (2007) and Catwoman (2004), but more overwhelming successes than failures with D.C. and Chris Nolan leaving an indelible bat-shaped mark on cinema before Marvel decided to try something big with their Avengers initiative.

And in expansion there is a problem.  Marvel started with one character, Iron Man, facing a relatively minor and contained threat. They had the vision (ok, pun intended there) and ambition to combine their roster and develop crossovers between them.  Other characters were gradually introduced and connections established between them, and within four years Iron Man had became Avengers Assemble with a whole team of characters and interstellar threat.  Huge success and massive profit followed; it was a justified commercial hit and really satisfying to watch, having stayed with the project throughout the whole build up. 

So where does Marvel go from here? Expansion? More characters?  For every surefire hit like Iron Man 3 or Age of Ultron, they throw in a Guardians Of The Galaxy and Ant-Man.  They’re still building towards something and ultimately this will lead to a change in the structure of the films.  So far there have been fairly standard unilateral heroes leading their own films, with the occasional team up.  Eventually, Marvel will be entering realm of the ensemble film more and more often.

It is easy to get these things wrong: with too many characters, somebody always gets short changed, plots become unfocused and enemies become unthreatening in the face of so much power on the good guys’ side, and when all this happens you lose sense of drama.  The three recent Fantastic Four films struggled to balance four characters and keep the whole thing interesting (yeah, they didn’t struggle, they failed), but the biggest offenders have been the X-Men films.  From 2000’s X-Men to this year’s bloated but fun Apocalypse, characters are routinely given almost nothing to do, with Oscar winners like Halle Berry and Jennifer Lawrence shelved in favour of Wolverine. And they now face the problem of where to go now that the heroes have prevented somebody literally destroying the world.  Once the team is made, it’s hard to un-make. Stand alone films would be a risk on the back of under-developed characters, and would prompt quite sensible questions like “why don’t the rest of the X-Men come to help?”

The problem is that with too many characters, we don’t get enough time with anyone to care about them (hence the reliance on Wolverine), and many are reduced to being a power rather than a person.  The benchmark for this is still Avengers Assemble, but this had the advantage of Marvel’s long game planning.  The Assemble audience already knew who everyone was, their characteristics and power sets, and this left much more time for fall outs, conflicts and flashy ways of dispatching alien invaders: the fun stuff.  As superhero ensembles go it’s perfect, and only really approached by this year’s Captain America: Civil War (which again benefits from pre-established characters).

I’ll make a sweeping statement and say that D.C. are playing catch up with Marvel, who gambled first and proved that this superhero lark is highly lucrative and they want to make hay while the sun is still shining, before cape fatigue inevitably sets in.  Marvel have trusted their creatives to do their thing (although Edgar Wright may disagree with that), leaving enough connective tissue between films and TV shows to keep it all together.  D.C. have already ruined their chances of emulating this by separating small screen Arrow and Flash from their cinematic counterparts, and are betting everything on their films.  Chris Nolan’s Batman films were so successful, but detached from any other D.C. properties, the studio couldn’t resist checking the utility belt for more money and re-introducing him into their project.

They don’t have time to do this like Marvel did, and they know it.  D.C. are therefore disadvantaged by two things: their major characters have existing cinematic baggage, which needs to be shed for audiences to accept new versions; and too many new characters to introduce in a really short space of time.  Multiple Batman and Superman franchises mean that while audiences already know the characters, they have to hold up great big signs that say WE’RE STARTING OVER! so people don’t get confused and say “Didn’t Batman retire at the end of The Dark Knight Rises?” They also have to establish unknown (to non-geeks) characters like Aquaman, Cyborg, Flash and eventually Shazam.

As if to illustrate my point (not really – I wrote this after watching the film), D.C. have had a go at introducing several characters in one go with Suicide Squad, and the results were… less than super.

The Bourne Appreciation: my review of Jason Bourne

Jason Bourne has returned.  After three genre-defining films and one hilariously bad spin off (The Bourne Misfire, I think was the title) that stunk of cash-cow milking by the studio, Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon have revived their amnesiac anti-Bond for one more bout.  Regular readers (if I have such a thing) will have guessed how I feel about reboots, rehashes and remakes of successful and beloved characters and series (for the benefit of non-regular readers, I’m pretty cynical about them) so the announcement of a further instalment didn’t exactly fill me with excitement.  But with Greengrass and Damon on board following their excellent work on Supremacy and Ultimatum, there was at least some potential.

Stylistically at least, there are no surprises here.  This is not a criticism; Greengrass’ kinetic direction suits Bourne like a hotwired car.  His work on films like United 93 and Captain Phillips has established him as one of Hollywood’s foremost purveyors of nerve-shredding tension.  Jason Bourne sees him employ his hand held documentary style pretty much throughout the whole thing creating a sense of paranoia that suits both the post-Snowden state surveillance themes and the frenetic action scenes.  He knows when and where the reign it in, though, allowing the calmer scenes to tip toe before breaking into a sprint for the set pieces.

These, too are impressive.  One of the best things about Ultimatum in particular is that the set pieces were not simply there for the sake of meeting genre requirements; they served and told the story.  The same is true here almost all the time.  An impressive cat-and-mouse sequence set during a Greek austerity demonstration/riot both establishes and kills characters while getting Bourne back in the game.  There’s a London-set sequence that manages to not repeat Ultimatum’s Waterloo station set piece or feel like a rehash; it’s tense, well choreographed and drives the plot forwards.  The Las Vegas sequence, while sometimes hard to follow, is as good as anything the series has offered until a what should have been a climactic confrontation leads to a car chase which, while impressive, feels tacked on after what precedes it.  It’s Bourne becoming an assassin again after almost 4 films of resistance and doesn’t quite fit.

The Bourne films always cast strongly with the likes of Brian Cox, Clive Owen, Albert Finney, Joan Allen and Chris Cooper all giving strong service.  Here, Tommy Lee Jones’ experienced CIA chief makes you wonder why he’s never featured before and Vincent Cassel is so perfect a fit as the nameless ‘Asset’ it again makes you wonder whether he was in one of the previous films; not necessarily a good thing as this their characters feel a bit like archetypes. It’s Alicia Vikander’s resolute CIA cyber security officer (and Riz Ahmed’s compromised social media guru) who offers something new: she is driven ambition rather than just by-the-numbers spy games;  she makes a genuine attempt to see Bourne’s point of view, and adds a contemporary twist.  Her character’s expertise adds an interesting new layer to the premise: how does one hide when facial recognition software and any CCTV camera in the world could be used to find you? It’s a fresh new challenge for a spy who can beat anyone at fisticuffs, gunplay or driving.

Jason Bourne retains the unrefined, rebellious edge that drove the Bond producers to up their game in the Daniel Craig era, turning their suave secret agent into a cold, insubordinate killer.  Bourne, in Greengrass’ eyes anyway represents a reaction to Bond’s ‘Queen and Country’ ethos.  Seen as an enemy by the very people who trained him, he’s on his own side rather than America’s, with loyalty earned rather by sworn.  Here, the Treadstone program that created Bourne has been replaced by the distinctly fascist sounding Iron Hand.  It’s probably not deliberate, more of a zeitgeist-y consideration, that the CIA’s devious plan (spying on everyone in the world via their online habits), is almost identical to that of Blofeld in latest Bond adventure Spectre.  Evil, it seems, is a matter of perspective when it comes to spies and while I’m one of many people who hope that Bond is reinvented again, I would be happy if this turned out to be Bourne’s noisy, exciting, subversive but kind of slight swansong.