For some inexplicable reason, Ghostbusters just won’t stay dead. The original was a major hit at the summer ’84 box office and earned both critical and fan affection but in the nearly-four decades years since its release, there has been a not-as-well-received sequel, one season of a kids animated series, a failed video game, and two attempts at a reboot/sequel. None of them really connected with the rapidly aging fan base and all have been seen as a disappointing addendum to the popular supernatural comedy that your dad loved so much.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a bit of a last gasp attempt to win the hearts and minds of future generations; a ploy to invest the youth in this 80s import about wacky scientists catching ghouls with proton packs and ghost traps by leaning hard on a Spielbergian sense of wonder. The Amblin-inspired Stranger Things approach (there’s even Finn Wolfhard there to further etch the parallels into stone) works for a while, creating a childlike sense of wonder as the fantastical and comedic elements bump up against each other, until the film buckles under an incessant need to “service the fandom” and forklift in dump loads of nostalgic nods, visual winks, and callbacks, much to the detriment of the film.

For the most part, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a well-constructed piece. It’s well shot, the effects work is a largely delightful mix of new CGI and throwback practical work, and the young cast ably steps into the forefront, but the script doesn’t trust the story it’s telling enough to let the new characters stand on their own and falls to pieces trying to rub its stomach and pat its head at the same time.
Jason Reitman, best known for pulling writer-director duties on crusty dramedies like Juno, Tully, and Thank You For Smoking, takes over for his late father Ivan Reitman, who co-wrote and directed the first two films in the franchise. Thematically, Ghostbusters: Afterlife’s strength lies in the not-so-subtle emotionality of passing this particular baton, the film in itself an ode to hard-working father’s who couldn’t show up.

Callie’s (Carrie Coon, unforgivably wasted in her role) absent father is precisely that. When she and her two children Trevor (Wolfhard), a wisecracking teen with surging hormonal energy, and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), an autism-coded kid genius, find out that he has passed, they head to his decrepit “dirt farm” in the middle of Summerville, Oklahoma to wrap up his affairs. As in, cash the inheritance check and bounce. Instead they find the town in the throes of a haunting that threatens to unleash a global ghost apocalypse. There’s portals.

Between trying to fit in at a new fast food job and summer school, respectively, Trevor and Phoebe discover that their grandfather was an original member of the Ghostbusters. They rifle through his antique ghostbusting gear before deciding to chase down ghosts on their own, wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting town in the process. But they’re trying to save the world so no harm, no foul. Paul Rudd factors in as a hack science teacher and romantic interest to Callie and he’s in full goober mode, a razor thin character in a movie surprisingly full of them.

What begins with decent-enough promise disintegrates as the whole of the picture begins to take form. As we ramp up towards an inevitable ghoulish showdown, the focus becomes more and more on teasing props from the original film, offering connective breadcrumbs, and teasing special appearances, all while offering little substance of its own. There are flashes of genuine joy, like when Trevor, Phoebe and her friend Podcast (Logan Kim) zoom through the main drag, proton blasting a metal-chomping slime bag named Muncher along with the quaint downtown itself but these moments exist outside the film’s pressing mission to nod over and over again to the original. This becomes especially grating in a sloppy, slapped-together third act that papers over plot holes by distracting audiences with hits of nostalgia. “Don’t pay attention to that… Look it’s Dan Aykroyd!”

If you’re looking for more than plentiful nods to the original, the promise of cameos, and a legacy story that lives and dies by its connection to existing IP, then Ghostbusters: Afterlife will likely be dead on arrival. Though showing sparks of life early on, Reitman’s creation is too interested in reanimating what is already dead and gone instead of making way for a new generation of stories to be told in this universe. In much the same way that the recent Star Wars trilogy crumbled by virtue of using its legacy and nostalgia as a narrative crutch, Ghostbusters: Afterlife makes the critical mistake of confusing IP mining for thorough storytelling.

CONCLUSION: With ‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife‘, the supernatural-comedy franchise hopefully has found its final resting place. There’s elements that work really well here – the kid’s performances, a lot of the creature effects, the general tone – but they’re undone by an incessant need to connect all dots back to where things began, making for a story that feels like a rather flavorless coda rather than a frightfully entertaining meal in itself.