Girls of Summer: Ghostbusters Joins Finding Dory and The Shallows as One of the Summer’s Best

It’s too soon to call the summer movie season over, though some have already declared it DOA. Many of the highly anticipated films turned out to be bad. Some of them made money anyway, some did not. The films that have surprised audiences and critics the most have been female-driven stories.

After all of the hype and real or imagined turmoil, Paul Feig’s fourth collaboration with Melissa McCarthy turns out to be one of the summer’s best films, and not necessarily because it pays homage to the original. The best thing about Ghostbusters is how it is very much a Paul Feig/Melissa McCarthy movie before it is a reboot of a beloved franchise.

Ghostbusters, Feig and McCarthy’s fourth collaboration together after Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Spy, is superbly funny. Like their other films, Ghostbusters is all about the ways the characters fail as much as it is about them succeeding. Reteaming with Kristen Wiig from Bridesmaids, and adding two scene stealers, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, Feig takes Ghostbusters to the same funny, awkward places he and his cast of improvisers usually go and that makes it work. It both exists as its own thing and also tips its hat to the original enough that it ends up looking like the first Ghostbusters’ quirky cousin.

All told, Feig and McCarthy have made 440 million together, which is not too far off of what Matt Damon has made with the Bourne films so far. That gives McCarthy rare box office clout and she remains one of a handful of women who can successfully “open” a film.

Ghostbusters is really less about the original film and more about the chemistry between Feig and McCarthy, or perhaps Feig and the funny actors that populate his films. As a director (and former actor), Feig knows how to tease out the funny of any scene mostly by allowing his already funny actors to improvise. That’s probably why he works so well with McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, who are masters at improv.

While McKinnon is stealing the show with critics and should make her a big film star (if Hollywood is smart about it), the heart of the film lies with McCarthy and Wiig’s relationship as old friends who had a falling out over ghosts. These are smart scientists who are actually ghost finders and eventually ghost hunters. They aren’t taking over where the first film left off and are instead offering up a original origin story flipped – women instead of men. What’s probably most surprising, and something you don’t often see on the big screen, is no single woman is offered up as eye candy. Usually there has to be one “hot blonde” in a miniskirt. Such a thing never shows up. Instead you get Chris Hemsworth.

Blake Lively holding down The Shallows represents one of the few wholly original stories to hit summer movie audiences, without any pre-awareness. And even if it isn’t the best movie, she’s great in it and it holds together as any great B-movie should. Lively doesn’t know she’s acting in a B-movie, which is probably why it’s as good as it is. The shark looks fake, of course, and it’s nonsensical that it would still be in the bay after it had its fill of surfers and a dead whale. Still, this is one of those times that one simply surrenders to the power of a big screen summer film experience and honestly, not many that played this year offered even that.

Finding Dory is currently 2016’s highest grossing film at $422 million. Blake Lively carried The Shallows to being one of the best reviewed summer action movies, and now Ghostbusters – which was being heralded as a disaster – has turned out to be potentially another summer hit, and certainly has gotten the kind of good reviews it needs to be one of the success stories.

Admittedly, people like me and many men and women who write about film wanted Ghostbusters to be good. To many of us, it HAD to be good. It was partly to beat back the fanboy protests early on that bemoaned the need to mess with their childhoods. But it was also that there is much on the line for women in Hollywood. An all-female Ghostbusters is a pretty big deal if you care about women having the same opportunities as men. After all, we’re 50% of the ticket buyers. It was a relief to see that the movie actually IS good. While watching the screening I could hear various pockets of women around me trying to start clapping after certain scenes, and I could feel the stone faces of the males who refused to do so. Ghostbusters still has to make money. Bad reviews would have killed its chances. McCarthy has been breaking new ground each and every time her films cross the $100M mark. We’re all hoping that this one turns out to be another one of those.