Who you gonna call? Not this lot! The all-female Ghostbusters lacks original's charm or wit writes BRIAN VINER 

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Ghostbusters (12A)

Verdict: Could sap your spirits 

Rating:

Even the average poltergeist might have held its hands to its ears, such was the screeching indignation that greeted the news that Paul Feig, director of 2011’s Bridesmaids, was remaking the 1984 hit comedy Ghostbusters — with female leads.

When the promotional trailer was launched in March, the sound and fury intensified. Almost a million people have officially ‘disliked’ it on the video-sharing website YouTube, the computer-age equivalent of being placed in the stocks and pelted with rotten cabbages.

Ghostbusters now has the unenviable distinction of being the only movie trailer in the Top 10 most hated pieces of YouTube footage.

The filmmakers promptly shrieked back, accusing their accusers of misogyny and all sorts. But now at last we can calmly judge the entire picture on its merits, not as a remake, nor even as a remake with Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig instead of Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, but as a comedy in its own right.

Ghostbusters now has the unenviable distinction of being the only movie trailer in the Top 10 most hated pieces of YouTube footage

I know quite a few women who’ve already seen it and greatly enjoyed it, and some men who are less enamoured, so I sense the spectre of a gender divide. Because my own verdict is a banshee howl of disapproval. Ghostbusters isn’t a crashing disappointment (to me) because it contains mainly women instead of mainly men. It’s a crashing disappointment because it strains way too hard for laughs, and contains one of the most distractingly irritating performances I’ve seen for a long time — from Kate McKinnon, a star of the American TV institution Saturday Night Live.

Some of the early reviews have mystifyingly hailed McKinnon, who mugs her way through the entire film as eccentric ghostbuster Dr Jillian Holtzmann, as scene-stealingly wonderful. Yes, she is scene-stealing, but only in the way that Ronnie Biggs was train-robbing; you really wish she had restrained herself.

I saw this with my two sons, aged 17 and 21, who unlike many moviegoers of my generation are not in thrall to the memory of the 1984 classic. They were as aghast as I was at how hard she tries to be amusingly zany, and how thuddingly she fails. McCarthy and Wiig offer more subtlety, if only insofar as a zooming ambulance is quieter than a whizzing fire engine.

I saw this with my two sons, aged 17 and 21, who unlike many moviegoers of my generation are not in thrall to the memory of the 1984 classic

Of course, they are consummate comic actresses, and Wiig in particular does a decent job as Erin Gilbert, a Columbia University academic desperate to be taken seriously, but haunted by a textbook she once wrote about ghosts.

When she is fired by her crustily domineering boss (played by the ubiquitous Charles Dance, who has taken to materialising with almost paranormal regularity in films requiring domineering crustiness), she winds up back in cahoots with her former friend Abby Yates (McCarthy), co-author of the ghost book and still an investigator into things that go bump in the night.

They set up in business, their phantom-detecting bells and whistles designed by the nutty Holtzmann, and the phones inexpertly manned by hunky but vacuous Kevin (Chris Hemsworth, gamely subverting the comedy archetype of the good-looking but ditsy female secretary). Patty (Leslie Jones), a subway worker who comes to report apparitions in her tunnel, completes the team as they try to stop malevolent spirits from destroying New York.

Fans of Ivan Reitman’s original film will recognise plenty of reverential nods, not least the celebrated theme song, plus cameo appearances by several of the 1984 cast.

Judged as an inventive comedy staking its own claim for movie immortality, however, well . . . I’m afraid I saw right through it

This is both a strength and a weakness, a welcome (though overdone) conspiratorial wink to the audience but also a reminder that Reitman, back this time as a producer, delivered a picture of considerably more charm all those years ago. Still, some pleasures shimmer out of the mire.

There is a spectacular and a splendidlychoreographed concluding hullabaloo, and some sharp one-liners. I liked Andy Garcia’s mayor, suppressing media coverage of the ghosts to avoid public panic, yet equally desperate not to be compared with ‘the mayor in Jaws’.

Judged as an inventive comedy staking its own claim for movie immortality, however, well . . . I’m afraid I saw right through it.

Ice Age: Collision Course (U)

Verdict: Unlikely to be a hit 

Rating:

Ice Age: Collision Course, the first big family movie of the summer holidays, is another disappointment; too confusing for children and too calculating for grown-ups. It is the fifth film in a franchise which began in 2002, and which has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for the animators Blue Sky Studios.

All good epochs come to an end, however, and this one should have done so before it started to whiff quite so strongly of commercial exploitation.

Ice Age: Collision Course, the first big family movie of the summer holidays, is another disappointment

All the regulars are back, led by Scrat the squirrel, whose attachment to his acorn this time leads to the solar system’s creation (there’s a nice Big Bang moment as Saturn rolls into place in the middle of its rings) while sending asteroids hurtling towards Earth. Meanwhile, Manny the mammoth (voiced by Ray Romano) is finding it hard to accept that his daughter Peaches (Keke Palmer) is betrothed, while Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) can’t find anyone to love him, until he meets Brooke (Jessie J), a sloth who has found the secret of eternal youth inside an old asteroid, in an earthly Eden known as Geotopia and run by a venerated llama.

Why a llama? For no particular reason except to facilitate a pun; he is the Shangri Llama.

Most of this will zip, comet-like, over the heads of the children it is notionally aimed at; as will the plan to deflect the asteroids with magnetic crystals.

As for the adults who stand a better chance of understanding the plot, they might find it similarly challenging to tolerate the company of Buck the one-eyed weasel, the hyper-active know-all, raucously voiced by Simon Pegg, whose mind we look into in what seems suspiciously like a direct steal from Pixar’s vastly superior Inside Out.