New York Comic Con 2021: Jason Reitman pays homage to his father’s 1984 remake by both updating it and borrowing from it as much as possible
It’s been 37 years since Ivan Reitman’s “Ghost Busters” (yes, there really did used to be a space in there) became a smash hit summer blockbuster, ushering in one generation after generation of new toys, animated TV shows, video games, a sequel and even a reboot. And if you have any affection for any of those other iterations of the “Ghostbusters” series you can just chuck those out the window right now, because Jason Reitman’s “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” goes the “Halloween” route and declares that practically nothing outside of the original motion picture ever happened. It may seem like freeing “Afterlife” from the baggage and mythologies of the later installments is a good idea, but ironically, all it’s really done is given Jason Reitman carte blanche to repeat a lot of the major beats from the original movie, but with different characters and different settings. Reitman’s direction may be sharp and professional, but that’s only in the service of familiar material, so it falls to an excellent cast to make the most of a very repetitive situation. The story kicks in when Egon Spengler (originally played by the late Harold Ramis) dies in the small town of Summerville, alone and under mysterious supernatural circumstances. His dilapidated estate has been bequeathed to his hitherto unseen daughter, Callie (Carrie Coon), a single mother raising a teenaged sarcasm dispenser named Trevor (Finn Wolfhard, “Stranger Things”) and a young scientific genius named Phoebe (Mckenna Grace, “Malignant”) who takes after her grandfather. A lot. They move back into Egon’s old house and discover that it’s a wreck, but with nowhere else to go — they just got evicted — Callie decides to move in. Trevor gets a summer job at burger joint so he can try, and repeatedly fail, to make an good impression on his cool co-worker Lucky (Celeste O’Connor, “Selah and the Spades”). Phoebe is given a choice of asbestos removal or summer school, so she opts for the latter and meets a geeky seismologist and teacher named Mr. Grooberson (Paul Rudd). And thank goodness for that: Not because Paul Rudd is gift to every comedy he’s in (he is), but also because Grooberson is the only person in this whole movie who seems to remember that the Ghostbusters were actually a thing once.
