Ghostbusters II sequel reassessment: a franchise revival that never finds its purpose

Ghostbusters II brought the team back five years after Gozer, and the film never decides what it wants that reunion to mean.

Trailer, via Ghostbusters.

The Courtroom, the Slime, and the Scoleri Brothers

The setup is the strongest thing here. The Ghostbusters were sued and put out of business after the destruction caused during their battle with Gozer. Ray Stantz owns an occult bookstore and works a side job alongside Winston Zeddemore as unpopular children’s entertainers. Egon Spengler studies human emotions in a lab. Peter Venkman hosts a television talk show about psychics.

Dana Barrett, now with an infant son named Oscar, contacts them after his stroller rolls, seemingly independently, into a busy intersection.

That premise has teeth. The sequel to a hit about unlicensed exterminators becoming municipal saviors should be about what happens when the city stops being grateful. Ghostbusters II knows this and then drops it.

A River of Slime Under Beach Pneumatic Transit

The Ghostbusters dig up the intersection and find a river of slime in the abandoned Beach Pneumatic Transit system. Ray takes a sample, gets attacked, breaks a pipe onto a power line, and blacks out the city. They land in court, where the slime sample reacts to the judge’s tirade against them and then explodes, manifesting the ghosts of the Scoleri brothers — men he had sentenced to death. The Ghostbusters catch them, and the judge dismisses the charges.

The courtroom sequence is the film’s best set piece and the clearest statement of what Aykroyd and Ramis wanted: negative human emotion pooling under a city until it empowers something malevolent. It is a real idea. The movie keeps it in a jar.

Vigo the Carpathian Wants a Child

At the museum where Dana restores art, a painting of Vigo the Carpathian comes to life. Vigo was a 16th-century European tyrant and powerful magician. He enslaves Dana’s boss, Janosz Poha, and orders him to bring a child to possess so he can escape the canvas and conquer the world. Janosz, infatuated with Dana, picks Oscar.

Peter MacNicol plays Janosz with a commitment the rest of the film does not match. Wilhelm von Homburg is Vigo, voiced by Max von Sydow — two names doing work the script does not.

Reitman said he was worried about being able to surprise the audience without relying on elaborate special effects, and that he wanted to focus on character interaction, believing that was the original film’s main draw. He was right about the diagnosis. The sequel has the cast and not the rhythm. Bill Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, Weaver, Hudson, Moranis and Annie Potts all return, and the film gives them less to do together than the first one did with half the plot.

The production history explains some of it. Columbia wanted a sequel and hit resistance from cast and crew. The script went through many variations. The budget was $30–40 million, filming ran November 1988 to March 1989 in New York City and Los Angeles, and large sections were scrapped after poorly received test screenings. New scenes were written and filmed during re-shoots between March and April 1989, only two months before release.

That is not an excuse. It is a description of a movie assembled rather than finished.

What the Sequel Gets Wrong

Ghostbusters II is not a disaster. The tagline — “Guess who’s coming to save the world again?” — promises a victory lap, and the film delivers the reunion and the comeback. What it does not deliver is a reason for any of it beyond the fact that the first one made money.

Murray was dismissive of sequels in general, believing they exist only for “greed” or “business” reasons, the latter of which he said should carry a death sentence. He also said he came back because “working on the first Ghostbusters was the most fun any of us had.” Both things are visible on screen. The cast is happy to be there. The movie does not know why.

The slime is the tell. It is a genuinely good metaphor — a city’s accumulated meanness taking physical form — and the film uses it as a special effect. Ghostbusters II has the idea for a better movie inside it and keeps interrupting that movie with the one it actually is.

Key facts
– Release date: June 16, 1989
– Runtime: 108 minutes
– Budget: $30–40 million
– Genre: Comedy, Fantasy
– Score: 5.6/10 (Metacritic 56/100)

Schedule

Score: 5.6/10 (Metacritic 56/100).

1989 movies · Bill Murray · film sequel · Ghostbusters II · Ivan Reitman · movie review