 As I record this video, I'm less than 24 hours from going to Ghostbusters Afterlife with my family. Am I excited? No, not in the slightest. Which is so sad as a fan of Ghostbusters 1 and 2 to not even have an inkling of excitement for this new movie. Thanks, Bill Murray! If you don't know what that sarcastic thanks Bill Murray is all about while Google's your friend. Spoiler alert, he's not the hero in this story. No, the reason we have that god-awful 2016 film is because Bill Murray held out for years and years and decades and decades and refused to do a third entry. It was hard enough just to get him to come back for the second. And this is again why we have a Ghostbusters Afterlife. Things could have been far different. We might have had five or six of these with the original cast, but no, things often don't turn out the way we want kids. And that's a story for another time and by someone that's far more knowledgeable on the subject. Today, though, I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart. That's a little controversial, I guess. And that's my unapologetic love for Ghostbusters 2. A movie that's not perfect and certainly not better than the original, but it's a good movie all the same. Let's talk about it for a bit. If I was you and you were me, you'd want to be winning. If you want something bad, yo, you gotta want to take it all. Reason number one, Bobby Brown's masterpiece on our own. The song crafted specifically for Ghostbusters 2. Is it as popular as the Ray Parker Jr. song Ghostbusters from the original and back again in the sequel? No, of course not. That's madness. What Bobby Brown has crafted here, though, is another fine entry to the Ghostbusters catalog. Think Will Smith's Men in Black 2 song, nod your head. Is it as good as the first one? Here come the Men in Black? No. Is it still a banger? Hell yeah. Nod your head. The black suits come in. Nod your head. Okay, scratch that. Bobby Brown's song is much better. Remember when Pitbull did the theme song for Men in Black 3? Why? Reason number two why this sequel is awesome is what I just did. I love the logo. I like that they incorporated it not just all over the merch, but in the movie itself because the Ghostbusters were laid off and for five years they weren't busting ghosts. They came back so they get the sequel. The logo reflects that. It's just brilliant. I love when they do that kind of thing in films when they're able to really play off the sequel and the title. Just so good. I've already given you two objective pros about the sequel and we haven't even talked about the story or really the movie. I don't have a chessboard in front of me, but I'm ready to drop your King and say checkmate. I'm assuming that everyone watching this video hates Ghostbusters 2, which isn't fair. It did get shellacked by critics though when it came out and there's a lot of people that still really don't like this film. Is it a little bit provocative for me to do this video stating that I love it? I don't think so. I think that there's a big internet out there and there's plenty of people that agree. And if you're one of the people that hate the film, I can see your point. Let's talk about some of the cons first. The story is redundant, I guess you could say. And I'm going to use the story here as both a pro and a con. Right now we're going with the con and really the Statue of Liberty is what I'm going to harp on. The fact that this had to happen in the same vein as the Marshmallow Man. I mean, come on. Yes, there's parallels and they play it kind of the opposite way where the evil Marshmallow Man was there to destroy everyone as opposed to the Statue of Liberty, which is the beacon of hope used to destroy the villain. So they kind of flipped a script and that happens throughout this film. I have to say, FXY is the Statue of Liberty is still pretty cool. I know it's a person in a costume for the most part, but the actress is doing a pretty damn good job convincing me it's made of stone or whatever that thing is made out of. I don't know, I wasn't good at history. The other negative, and this is one I've actually softened on over the years thanks to everything going on in our real world right now. The idea that no one remembers or believes what happened in the first movie. It's been five years. The Ghostbusters have been shut down. They've been sued for all the damage done. And I guess everyone collectively forgot that a giant step of Marshmallow walked downtown and destroyed millions of dollars worth of things. I guess they forgot about the myriad of ghosts parading around New York like it's their own personal play place. Certainly must have forgot the crazy weather going on that day with the, you know, souls of the undead flying around here and there. These people have a horrible memory. I said I softened on it a bit over the years because people still believe the moon landing was faked and that the earth is flat. So... Holy shit. People are dumb. Transformers 2 did that same shit where everyone collectively forgot that there were giant robots fighting on highways and downtown in Chicago or maybe that was New York as well. It's probably New York. It almost always is. I mean, those are kind of it for me as far as the negatives go. I really don't have a whole lot more to say. The movie works, I think. I think it works very well. It's a sequel. I don't know of another movie that has the balls to start their first shot with boom five years later. No lead up even. It's just boom. We have moved forward five years audience. You've all seen the last movie. We know you have. That's confidence. That's bold, man. It's hilarious and appropriate where the Ghostbusters are at in their lives. Ray and Winston are doing house calls pretending to be fighting ghosts, dancing to their own theme song. And of course, all the kids don't care. They want to see He-Man. Some of these references don't last the test of time. Oh, never mind. It would be He-Man still. I forgot that awesome Kevin Smith show. Ray and Egon are also running a bookstore that's got a bunch of weird occult shit in it and for some reason the store is open till midnight on Saturdays. I think. I just rewatched this movie. It's either Saturdays or Sundays. I can't remember which. I think it's Saturdays. It's not really important here. And then there's Peter Venkman who of course is running his own psychic TV show that's completely full of shit. I don't know why I'm going into detail so much. I wasn't really planning on breaking the entire plot down beat by beat. That's not what I do. I just wanted to go over some of the highlights, the lowlights, give my reasons for liking this film. The main reason this movie works is because Ivan Reitman's back. A lot of the same people behind the scenes are involved and our core cast is still firing on all cylinders. There's some great chemistry here arguably even better than the first. It's nice to see more Winston involved in things even though they still shaft him out of a couple scenes for no real reason at all. The always lovely Sigourney Weaver's back is Dana Barrett. She's now got a kid named Oscar. That's going to be an important piece of this plot and it's a plot that on its surface isn't the deepest. It doesn't make the most sense, but if you dig into it more, things really do connect and that is another problem with the script that I didn't really bring up. The fact that there's two kind of villains going on here and they don't really do the best job of connecting them. I know they went back and reshot some stuff, added scenes because things didn't add up to the audience when they tested it out originally. They did a better job of piecing it together for sure. It's still not quite there. So what you have going on is the painting Vigo who's freaking awesome. I remember being a child and being scared out of my goddamn mind looking at this painting. It's not until Vigo leaves the painting where he kind of loses some of that fear factor. It's far more disturbing when his eyes are just shifting a little or his head kind of slowly pops out. A little bit less so when he looks like Fabio and his hair is all frizzled. He looks like he just got done surfing for the day. Not a good look. It's the fear of the unknown. You don't know what's going to happen. Is that painting going to pop out? Grab the person. You're going to rip out their heart. They're going to snap a neck. Well, no, none of that happens. I mean, that's what was I... I'm like six years old watching this and I have that crazy of an idea. Damn it, young Adam had some dark thoughts already. Getting back on track, as I stated, Vigo's the main threat here. He's got his sidekick Dr. Yanos. Yanos is so good in this movie and elevates every scene he's in. I don't know what his accent's supposed to be and when he's dressed up as a mother going to collect Oscar towards the end of the movie and that ghost arm extends, holy hell, nightmare fuel for me as a youngling. And when I was a child, I had no idea that was him for the longest time. I've seen this movie like 20 times. It didn't help that I mostly watch this on VHS and the quality wasn't the greatest. Things were a lot blurrier. It was hard to make out faces the best. The other threat is the slime brewing under the city. How did it get there? Well, from the New Yorkers themselves. They have shit attitudes and it's causing hate to manifest into the slimy substance. It has almost a mind of its own and when it's harnessed properly, can cause a lot of damage or help resurrect a medieval conqueror from the Dark Ages. AKA Lord Vigo. I really dig this concept that Harold Ramis and Dan Akroyd came up with of this slime manifesting from nothing because of the hate going on in the world and how it's getting to a boiling point and pretty soon the only way to stop it is to throw a little bit of love in the mix. So while the slime doesn't have anything to do with the painting initially, it's drawn to Vigo because it senses that anger and hate and rage and it wants to get some of that. It wants to get all of that. Think of the slime as the Lord of the Rings ring. It's trying to get back to its master. It wants to get home. It's not a one-to-one comparison. They don't really have anything to do with each other at first. It's just convenience that they both ended up in New York. It's a big place. It's understandable. I may be drilling into this a lot more than I need to. Ghostbusters isn't really supposed to be that complex of a movie. But I do think us fans do appreciate that there is a rich backstory to this stuff just like Gozer in the first one. There's the Keymaster. There's all this lore behind the scenes and that you can kind of decipher and decode as you watch the movie multiple times. There are little Easter eggs here and there. There's hints. Just small little throwaway lines of dialogue usually by Ackroyd that they fills in some of these details. So just like the first movie, we have our All Star cast back. Just like the first movie, we have awesome music. Just like the first movie, we have a kick-ass villain. Two villains, actually. And we even have our sidekicks. Lewis Tully's back as the inept lawyer who gets a great scene when the movie starts. Rick Moranis is so good always. Just flustered beyond all compare, completely out of his depth as he's trying to defend the Ghostbusters. Annie Potts's Janina's back. I will say her character does take a step back for me. She's a little bit more out there in this one. Not quite as snappy as she was in the first movie. Here, she's just more kind of weird. She's more sexually charged too. Very hungry for some of that Rick Moranis cake. I liked her in the first more for sure. How she's kind of just jabbing at the Ghostbusters, hanging up on people. It's good stuff. I think they did a decent job bringing Dana back into the mix. I do buy that her and Venkman wouldn't make it very long in a relationship and she would have to move on with her life. And I also buy that she would be part of this new supernatural thing happening. You know, she still has some of that Gozer stank attached to her so that Slime's really gonna go for her first. At least that's what I got out of it. That could just be total bullshit. It was just convenience. Dana also made a big impression on Janos. So he of course chooses her to be his bride and the mother of not Oscar anymore but a newborn Vigo that's going to take over Oscar's body. It's kind of a weird scenario, isn't it? Is he gonna have the mind of his older self? Is he just gonna be this evil little baby dictator running around using evil force powers? I mean, that's a movie I might pay to see. Maybe that should have been a Ghostbusters spin-off. Baby Vigo. I don't want it. I don't want it. One of the babies goes over and like pushes over his blocks accidentally. Baby Vigo picks up the rattle with the force. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Psssh. Venkman comes in, grabs Baby Vigo by his diaper, lays him over his leg and just starts spanking him. That's a bad Vigo. Tch, tch. Bad Vigo. I am completely gone at this point. Where were we? Oh yes, Ghostbusters 2. That's the focus here. The comedy is still on point. I've already made my case. I've said a lot of things that are great about this. What more do you want? Slimer? He's back. He's in it. Proton packs? They're there. The trap? Yeah? Of course. It's, of course, it's there. The Ghostbusters being out of shape and not at all superheroes? Big time. And that's where 2016 really dropped the ball in that final fight where they're like flipping around and whipping ghosts and trying to look all cool in front of a green screen with shenanigans flying this way and that. Ghostbusters was never about the special effects. Ivan Reitman hates that stuff. He's not interested in that. He wants to focus on the characters and the exchanges and the witty banter, the crafted dialogue. Sure, there's room for freestyling, but for the most part, this stuff is very well crafted. It's carefully orchestrated so that the beats hit so that they're sharp, witty, and quick. These guys are glorified plumbers. You have two incredibly sharp individuals. You have one that's a total snake oil salesman and a fourth who just wants a paycheck to put food on the table. They're not trying to fly around saving the day. They just want to get paid for doing a job. It's such a great concept. And of course, we idolize them as kids and even as adults, we look at their shitty car and their stupid outfits and the proton packs and we think, yeah, that's awesome. They just want to do the job and go home, study some spores or molds. Venkman just wants to get busy with Dana again. The only one in the cast that really wants to spotlight as a Ghostbuster is Louis Tully. And thankfully, he gets it in the end in a very comical scene where he starts blasting the slime right as the Ghostbusters stop Vigo. So of course, he thinks he finished it. He thinks he did the job himself. While I can definitely get the criticism that it's too much like the original, it's got the whole Home Alone 2 thing going on. This is one of those instances and I think it works that way for a lot of comedies where if you have a playbook and a formula that works, just kind of switch it a little bit but keep everything intact. Keep that spirit, keep that magic going. If you try to go too far away from it, if you veer too far left or right, you're going to lose the whole thing and it's going to crash in a fiery disaster. Look at Home Alone 2. I actually like Home Alone 2 more than the original. I'm going to be defending that soon in a video, probably in a week or so when it gets closer to the holidays. Look at Austin Powers 2. Not quite as good as the original in my book but they do a ton of the same stuff. They use a lot of the same jokes. They play off them in creative ways and that's what Ghostbusters 2 does. I think I made my case pretty damn well. If you agree with me that Ghostbusters 2 is a good movie, let me know in the comments. My wife likes it more than the original. I won't go that far but there's people out there that even like this one more. I think it's because of that painting. That painting is fire. If you hated this film, that's fine. I can understand it. They had a production schedule of half the time in the original. I think they did the whole thing in like six months as opposed to over a year. There was tons of chaos behind the scenes. The script was constantly being changed. They had to reshoot a lot of it. There was just a lot of drama going on. We're lucky this movie got made at all, honestly. Okay, I keep going off on tangents. Leave a comment below. Either way, love or hate, I'll probably agree with you in a lot of the points. Like this video if you did. It's just a reminder that there's a like button there. Subscribe if this is your first time or second or third and you haven't done so yet. And I'd love to see you watch further videos and comment in those videos. And with that, I just say goodbye and I hope they didn't screw this Ghostbusters movie up. We'll find out very soon. Look for that review as well. Well, I guess we're gonna have to take control. If you look this way, there are videos for you to play. I'm done. I promise.