Ghostbusters II |
  • USA • 1989 • 108m •    • Directed by: Ivan Reitman. • Starring: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Peter MacNicol, Harris Yulin, David Margulies, Kurt Fuller, Janet Margolin, Wilhelm von Homburg. • Music by: Randy Edelman.      Five years after the events of the first film, the Ghostbusters have been plagued by lawsuits and court orders, and their once-lucrative business is bankrupt. However, when Dana begins to have ghost problems again, the boys come out of retirement only to be promptly arrested. The Ghostbusters discover that New York is once again headed for supernatural doom, with a river of ectoplasmic slime bubbling beneath the city and an ancient sorcerer attempting to possess Dana's baby and be born anew. Can the Ghostbusters quell the negative emotions feeding the otherworldly threat and stop the world from being slimed?
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Review:
The movie makes no sense. For starters, as with a lot of sequels, it starts out with people who were living happily ever after at the end of the first movie. If they were still living happily ever after, there'd be no point to this crappy follow-up, so of course somewhere since the end of the first movie, stuff happened and no one's happy any longer, including the audience.
And, as with many sequels, they decided to take some elements of the first movie and have the audience choke down a ton more of it. Somehow, they got the idea that slime was really funny in Ghostbusters so let's make the slime a star and parade it endlessly across the screen.
The premise seems to be that there's a river of negative emotion, in the form of slime, under NYC that runs towards, for no particular reason, and terminates at a museum with a really big painting of a sixteenth century whack job. So, we have the slime and we have the bad guy and they seem to be related. There's slime, and there's a bad guy... and there's slime and a bad guy. I give up. Now, the bad guy, rather than come back to life as a full grown evil overlord who will rule the world, decides that he should grab some baby from someone (conveniently, Dana just happens to have one) and manifest his evil presence inside it and in seventeen or eighteen years, he'll be ready to rule the world when he gets out of high school. I smell an Oscar. Heh Heh.
The movie starts out with bold letters telling us: Five Years Later. Uh huh. Five years after, I guess, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man victory that, apparently, turned out to be a flurry of lawsuits and career ending bad vibes when the city woke up the morning after and realized it hadn't gone to bed with Mr. Right. Oh well, I guess when we saw all of the cheering New Yorkers admiring the ghostbusters in the first movie, we were MISTAKEN!
Dana and Bill's character (that's right, I don't even CARE what his character's name is anymore) didn't get married because Bill has problems with the whole commitment thing. Then, Dana married some other guy who we never see and know nothing about who impregnated her about a year before this sorry excuse for a movie begins and then he moved to London. I guess he had commitment problems too. At least the baby didn't pop out of her chest but I digress. The rest of the movie is more like a series of SNL skits that have little to do with each other. A lot of the actors who graced the first movie showed up for this one. The mayor, the accountant, the secretary who just magically shows up and becomes one again once the slime patrol regains its credibility, the slime guy who slimed Bill Murray in the first movie.
The movie is absolutely full of plot holes and stuff that happens for no particular reason. Rick Moranis was an accountant but now he's an attorney who has no courtroom experience. Later, he somehow hooks up with Annie Potts (the secretary) who is interested in him for no apparent reason and they get down in Dana's apartment. It gets worse. At what passes for the movie's finale, he has his own ghostbuster uniform and his own proton pack. Annie packs him off to wander the streets looking for a ride to the museum and finds the slimer is driving the bus. OK, where's the exit?
The original ghostbusters, in the meantime, have commandeered the Statue of Liberty and animated her so that she trudges off to the museum too, with the busters riding in her head. OK, so the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man couldn't do this movie because he had a previous engagement, right? I mean, if they're going to create one ridiculous, nonsensical plot hole after another, surely they could have glued Stay Puft back together, yeah? What other giant thing can we have walking down a busy NYC street smashing police cars inadvertently? Never mind that she's metal and could only manage to waddle incoherently towards the target. We animated her so now she's not metal. Fine, whatever. These two train wrecks converge on the museum. Liberty smashes the sky light. Oh goody, another lawsuit for Ghostbusters 3 if they can talk the studio in to financing it. The overlord shows up, makes some faces. The slime shows up and, well, slimes some faces. In a final bit of stupidity, Rick Moranis's character stands outside with a crowd that has appeared out of nowhere to sing Auld Lang Syne. In an amazing bit of timing, since he's in no way in communication with the actual ghostbusters, Rick shoots off his proton gun at the same time the other ghostbusters do and saves the day, er, night, er whatever. Happy New Year, New York, New York.
At this point, I'm having an out of body experience as this horrifyingly bad movie has sucked the will to live out of me. Oh my god, Bill. I've got news for you, dude, Garfield wasn't your biggest mistake after all! Perhaps drinking heavily before and during the movie would have helped. Anyway, the baby is safe, Dana is in love with Bill Murray's character again and the whole motley crew oozes it's way in to the sunset, er, moonset, whatever, to continue their happily-ever-after-or-not lives.
Review by rockchester from the Internet Movie Database.
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