Ghostbusters: Afterlife review – defanged retread that is lacking in spirit and laughs

The Ghostbusters franchise now gets a pointless and ill-suited sequel-iteration, co-written and directed by Jason Reitman (son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the original) that never quite acknowledges the tonal confusion created by introducing a new type of nice, non-bustable ghost. In an obtuse way, this film takes the story out of the big city (where ghosts swarmed excitingly and hilariously like rats), moves it out to smalltown Oklahoma, and tries to reinvent the whole thing as a sub-Spielbergian fantasy adventure with an adorable bunch of teens and tweens in the ghostbusting forefront.

It is here where original ghostbuster Dr Egon Spengler (once played by the late Harold Ramis) lived in reclusive retirement, worried about a mighty devil-spirit lurking in a nearby abandoned mine. He has left his tumbledown mansion to his grownup daughter, hard-up single mom Callie (Carrie Coon) and her two children Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), who are puzzled by what seems to be a big old car the size of a hearse under a tarp in the garage. They meet up with local kids Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky (Celeste O’Connor), on whom Trevor has a major crush. Meanwhile, Callie finds herself having feelings for the schoolteacher Mr Grooberson, played by Paul Rudd, who sadly isn’t in the movie much. The ghost eruption kicks off in this much less exciting and interesting non-city habitat.

The only Ghostbusters sequel that made any sort of sense was the spiky gender-switch reboot of 2016 with Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones – a film which understood that, like the original, it was supposed to be a comedy. That is airbrushed out of existence by this new, defanged and child-oriented Night-at-the-Museum approach, in which the keynote is vanilla blandness.

• Ghostbusters: Afterlife is released on 18 November in cinemas.