The delivery is sort of there, but nowhere close to the original film's cast. The script definitely isn't. The game from a few years ago even did the 'characters are possessed' thing better.
I'm actually quite astonished at how obnoxious some of the stereotyping is in execution. Look at Winston. He could have been virtually any ethnicity. We liked him because he was a charismatic blue collar guy who called a spade a spade - none of that had anything to do with the his skin colour. There's a black character in this and she's the exact opposite - a superficial understanding of her ethnicity seems to be informing how she acts and talks, rather than being incidental.
For obvious reasons, a number of female friends of mine on social media were looking forward to this, but even those who've bought into the hype are feeling very WTF about that character's portrayal.
There was something I couldn't quite put my finger on, in regards to the special effects... They feel on a par to what the live-action 'Scooby Doo' films exhibited, because these feel heavily stylised, but then I realised something else about why they felt off.
In the original, Slimer was quite stylised, but that's understandable, because it was providing some spectral comedy relief. The others were different - especially when you look back at the concept art for the various entities. Terror dogs, librarian ghost, the skeletal taxi driver - they all had a certain aesthetic to them and were there to provide a more deliberate horror undertone to the visuals.
Then it clicked... I don't know why, but it seems obvious that the production team aren't going back to those designs for inspiration - they're going back to the 'Real Ghostbusters' cartoon for inspiration!
Seriously. Compare and contrast. The ghost/monster designs we're seeing here fit right in with what we typically saw in the cartoon. It's a very different artistic and design approach. Would be interested in why they went down that route for the creature designs.
