I'm always leery of watching a parody of a classic film because there is always the danger that the parody will expose that one problem you always overlooked and suddenly you can't see the original without seeing the parody. There's no danger of that here, however. This film steals every single idea from
Ghostbusters and a few from
Men in Black, but handles them so poorly you'll never connect it with the originals. What? This wasn't a parody? Huh. Ok. What was it then?
It was a cash grab.
Plot
The story starts with a chick professor not getting tenure at her college because she wrote a book about ghosts a decade ago. This is not even close to believable. To fix this, she goes to the fat chick to make her stop selling the book at Amazon. Fat jokes ensue as Fat Girl argues with the Chinese delivery man. A minute or so into this, we have our first fart joke, which Judd Apatow's ghost turns into a female-front-side "fart" joke. And we're off on our magical journey.
From this point, we meet the lesbian chick and the black chick and we go through every single plot point from the original Ghostbusters film only done far less interestingly and far less competently. In a series of scenes, the girls get fired from their college, move into a new building, get a car, round up a ghost, do a much-used crowd surfing joke, hire a stupid secretary, meet the mayor, and fight the villain. As they do this, we are bored with treated to an origin story of every piece of hardware, every bit of music, every character, and every original image from the original Ghostbusters. We are also abused with treated to cameos from each of the original characters in the first film. In fact, there are so many it starts to feel like that is why they made the film.
Eventually, they beat the villain while blowing up a building in New York City and then the film ends with them as ambiguous heroes while Eyecandy Boy eats a sandwich and you wonder how to get the time you lost back.
Shameless
So where do we start to discuss this turd? Well, let's start with this. If you thought Bridesmaids was great, then this is probably the film for you. It's vapid, childish, tired and completely stolen. No new ground will be trod. The scenes bump together reasonable well, and they do so without asking you to use your brain. They just lurch from fat jokes to black jokes to fart jokes to sexism jokes to "I's so stupid" jokes. Good times. There is no dramatic tension to ruin any of it for you, and no demanding plot you need to keep track of. This is a film for retards.
For the rest of you, here's the deal. The film is watchable in the sense that most mindless ripoffs are. The scenes make sense in the order in which they are shot. The characters act like they are in the movie. The story moves from start to finish and wraps up without any huge mistakes. The effects are a step above what you see in the made-for-Sci-Fi-Channel films. And to keep you entertained the director steals every singe idea or image from Ghostbusters and a couple from Men in Black and dangles them in front of you to keep you from walking out. Oh look, shiny.
That said, the film is desperately not funny. Like most of the other films these losers have done, it is ad-libbed for the most part and none of them really have the skill to pull that off. I truly don't remember a single laugh. The jokes are awful and have no relation to the story: the fat girl is fat! the gay girl is gay! the black girl speaks ethnic gibberish! he's wearing glasses without glass... OMG?! He does logos, but they stink... they stink! The Chinese food arrives fast because they work above the restaurant! OMG that's funny! A minute long moronic argument about whether you can put a cat back in a bag after it is out of the bag. Ouch my sides! Please stop!
The villain is so forgettable you keep forgetting who he is until he appears on screen again... and even then you don't care. The characters are non-existent. The plot is for nought. You start to feel dirty about how much they steal, and ironically they are being nasty to most of it. They have real anger for the original film.
So what about the politics? This film is pretty despicable in that regard. It shits all over the original with tremendous anger and it does so in the name of a sort of vague "gurl power" theme. The girl power thing is a fraud though. These women are not competent. They don't prove that they can do anything. They don't start a business. They have no camaraderie. They don't invent anything. They don't prove anyone wrong. They don't even catch a ghost. There is not a single clever moment that makes a legitimate social commentary point. Instead, there are female genitalia "queef" jokes, males being hit in the dick, and a group of neurotic women claiming they can do "it", whatever "it" actually is. If this were the model of how women want young girls to act, how they want males to act, or what they think women can do, then women are in much worse shape than anyone knew. It's a bit like defining masculinity through Paul Blart Mall Cop.
The marketing of this thing was deeply deceptive as well, but we don't need to go into that. Suffice it to say that Paul Feig is a lying sack of shit who thought that agitating feminists, gays and blacks with an invented assault by haters was the best way to market his hack film. Hey black people, Gillette wants to restart slavery... buy Schick.
To put a fine point on this, this film is everything they said it was and worse. It is offensively political, but stupidly so. It is stolen. It is awful, almost beyond description. It is the raping of an existing property purely for profit with no care whatsoever about the people who will be suckered into seeing this film.
Skip this one.
