Ever since the gender-swapping reboot of the 1980s supernatural comedy Ghostbusters was announced two years ago, the project has suffered a backlash from fans resentful that women would be taking over the top roles. As the first reviews are released, has the spooky summer blockbuster silenced its critics?
The new movie, directed by Paul Feig (The Heat, Spy, Bridesmaids), stars Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, along with Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, as parapsychologists who start a ghost-zapping business in New York.
The female comedians take up roles that were famously played by Dan Ackroyd, Bill Murray, Rick Moranis and Harold Ramis in the original film, and this seems to be the problem. Long before the movie was released, reaction to the film's concept was vicious. An online campaign made the first trailer for the film the most disliked in YouTube history.
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Meanwhile, the film's director, Feig, received complaints from male fans of the original who claimed he had "ruined their childhood". Feig described some of the criticism he received as "vile, misogynistic shit".
Now the film is finally making its public outing, what do the reviewers think?
The new Ghostbusters "speaks to its time with the same withering comic accuracy and hot-air-balloon-sized sense of fun as the 1984 original", says Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph. He argues that while the 1984 version of the film explored the comedy of "male mediocrity", Feig's version finds comedy in "hyper-capable but self-doubting women".
If anything, the cameos from the original cast make Ghostbusters 2016, seem "a little too in thrall to the past", says Collin, who adds that the reboot's "jokes, effects and sparkler-bright cast chemistry need nothing to fall back on".
Call off the trolls, the new Ghostbusters is "a blast", says Nigel M Smith in The Guardian. While "blowhard middle-aged fanboys" predicted the whole project was damned, Smith says the film tackles the gender-trolling "without sacrificing laughs".
He adds that "fun oozes from almost every frame", likewise "the energy of a team excited to be revolutionising the blockbuster landscape".
Ghostbusters is "fun, funny and full of energy", says Jonathan Pile in Empire. "It's almost as if it never mattered that the four main characters were women," observes Pile, adding: "Strange that."
David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter, however, says the female cast makeover is where "where the inventiveness ended".
The new film follows the template of the original, says Rooney, but Feig's "witless script" is "short on both humour and tension". Rooney complains that the "spook encounters" are "rote" and "uninvolving" and the result is a lot of "busy-ness, noise and chaos, with zero thrills and very little sustainable comic buoyancy".
The film is released in the UK today.
