by Pauline Kael
Ghostbusters II has a nice, lazy, unforced rhythm. I found it much more enjoyable than the first Ghostbusters—the actors seem more convivial and the special effects less labored. (Actually, the effects are so frowzy you can just about ignore them.) It’s a big comedy, but it’s light on its feet, and the throwaway jokes are weightless—they ping! and dissolve in the air. You can’t remember what you’re laughing at, but you feel great.
The comic premise is that the collective angry energy of Manhattanites is feeding an underground river of boiling slime, which is rising; our bad vibes are literally destroying the city. The Ghostbusters were hounded out of business five years ago (the city sued them for the mess they made when they rescued it from poltergeists). They come back together to drive out a new crop of demons and turn New Yorkers’ attitudes around, so the goo will subside.
Luckily, the director, Ivan Reitman, doesn’t need to build scenes here. The script, by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd, is a floating crap game, like the scripts for the Hope and Crosby Road pictures. Assorted comedians simply come in and out of the scenes dropping one-liners. The chief dropper, Bill Murray, can perform casual miracles with a simple joke. He actually gets by in scenes where he just plays with an eight-month-old baby boy. Murray has changed psychologically since the first Ghostbusters: he isn’t playing the grungy, derisive outsider anymore—he’s mellowed. Yet he’s just as funny. In this movie, he’s obviously nuts about the heroine (Sigourney Weaver) and nuts about the kid. But he isn’t sentimental. I can’t think of any other comedian who has brought off this kind of transition—who has turned into a friendly, responsible guy while retaining access to the sources of his comedy. Murray’s humor is still different from anybody else’s. (Even when he does a Groucho routine, posing alluringly on a bed, the come-on is his own.)
In the scene where Murray is the cynical, know-it-all host of a cable-TV talk show called “World of the Psychic,” and in the courtroom scene, featuring Rick Moranis as the Ghostbusters’ attorney, the movie is like a perfectly achieved edition of “Saturday Night Live.” Ramis (in a pompadour that makes him look like photographs of George S. Kaufman) has sly, succulent bits as an egotistic sadist; Moranis and Annie Potts make a lovely nerdy team of madly infatuated nearsighted lovers; and Cheech Marin, in a couple of cut-in reaction shots, is a winner each time. Ernie Hudson, who has an agreeable (not particularly comic) presence, gets a big laugh when a ghost train runs right through him and he looks “spooked.” Probably the gag is meant to parody old racist set-ups, but you can’t be sure, and it may leave you uneasy. Apart from that, the movie, even at its sloppiest (there are a lot of starts that don’t go anywhere), produces nothing but the good vibes its heroes are dedicated to.
The goo—it’s pink—has an unfathomable connection with an evil seventeenth-century Moldavian whose portrait dominates the room where Weaver restores paintings, under the love-hungry supervision of a geeky bureaucrat named Janosz Poha, played by Peter MacNicol. Poha’s Carpathian Upper West Side diction has to navigate through his toothy smile; it’s a precarious journey, and the pure silliness of it— all the childish playacting it recalls—can make you surprisingly happy.
The New Yorker, July 10, 1989
