Goofy Ghostbusters 'Silences the Backlash'

Remaking Ghostbusters was never going to be easy. Luckily, an all-female cast wasn't afraid to answer the call. While audiences—who may or may not have read the hate blanketing the web—give this summer's reboot a 44% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, most critics are counting it as a win. Here's what they're saying.

• "Get over it, fanboy." This new Ghostbusters is "a fun, true-blue update of a classic," writes Colin Covert at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The visuals are much improved over 1984 and "the comedy is as rich as [director] Paul Feig … can get without an R rating." Covert adds Kate McKinnon "walks away with the film; her flawless reaction shots off to the side always eclipse the main gag."
• Less scary than the original, Ghostbusters is "goofy summer fun" that benefits from Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy's "natural give-and-take comic chemistry," writes Andrew Lapin at NPR. But "the real star" is McKinnon, who "resembles nothing if not a young Bill Murray." However, awkward plotting and editing knock the movie down a peg.

• Peter Rainer wasn't impressed. "The character comedy quickly gets trampled by the effects (in this case, not special)," he writes at Christian Science Monitor. Leslie Jones "has a few funny freestyle moments, as does McKinnon," but most of the cast has "been far funnier." Meanwhile, Chris Hemsworth plays "the male bimbo—a sex role-reversal joke that never takes off. The whole movie never takes off."
• Ann Hornaday doesn't agree. "Sunny, slimy, and profoundly silly, the new, lady-centric reboot of Ghostbusters immediately silences the backlash," she writes at the Washington Post. It "seems engineered to remind viewers of what it was meant to be all along: neither a workhorse for arguments about gender politics nor a Trojan horse for desecrating precious generational shibboleths, but simply an easygoing, enjoyable family comedy."

(Check out what Bill Murray had to say about the movie.)