Smart tykes as ghostbusters is not a bad idea as long as their personalities are colorful tinged with comic bravado. The tykes in this movie seemed to have emerged from "Stranger Things" (one of them, Finn Wolfhard, is from that show) and yet, except for one pre-teen kid, the rest are bland. "Ghostbusters: Afterlife" might have benefitted from having the tykes needing help with those slimy ghosts if they called the real ghostbusters thirty minutes after their story starts. Instead, the real guys don't emerge until the movie is practically over.
The one tyke here that has color in her personality is McKenna Grace as Phoebe Spengler, the very smart girl who is Egon Spengler's granddaughter. For non-"Ghostbusters" devotees, a little backstory here. Egon Spengler was the mild-mannered scientist who fought ghosts with his other ghostbusters in the first two "Ghostbusters" movies. He was the truly clever scientist who ratted out statistics and percentages like no one's business and he was played by the late Harold Ramis. Apparently Egon bought a farm in Oklahoma, nicknamed "Dirt Farm," and has had a feeling, an apocalyptic feeling, that some entity has escaped from an occultist's mine and may rule the world. He has several ghost traps in his front yard and then dies after being attacked in his chair. Meanwhile, Phoebe and her brother (Finn Wolfhard, great actor name) move with their mother (Carrie Coon) to this farm they inherited. Annie Potts as Janine, Egon's girlfriend, shows up at the beginning at this rustic, decrepit farm and then disappears from the movie! Phoebe eventually finds the proton pack and the famous P.K.E. meter that serves as an alert for ghost activity. And her brother doesn't know much about anything, hardly the nerd his sister is and develops an interest in a girl working at a 50's-type diner! This brief subplot is simply dull and unnecessary, bringing the movie to a major halt. And with all this setup for a story, the movie is close to the hour mark before its mojo really gets going.
Grace is terrific as Phoebe, who maintains her cool when chess pieces move by themselves or when a lamp moves with Egon's spirit intact. Some of this works for a little while but then we get Paul Rudd as a science teacher who is also a seismologist and shows movies like "Cujo" and "Child's Play" to the kids - I can't figure that one out. Rudd has a romantic interest in Phoebe's mother and all this simply marks time. None of it is exactly bad, just uninvolving. We get a few sparks of interest with a Ghostbusters fan named Podcast yet Phoebe is not used enough as an anchor for this movie. Special-effects dominate soon enough and we get one ghost called "Muncher" who spits out metal projectiles like bullets (a fun pudgy ghost) but then we get repeats of what the original 1984 film had - the return of the monstrous Zuul, the androgynous Gozer (now played by Olivia Wilde) and a few mini-Stay Puft marshmallow kids. Aside from the Stay-Puft kids, the rest is just recycling from the original without much of the pizazz or humor.
The end of this overlong, plodding movie has the return of the real Ghostbusters that we loved from the original but one wishes they formed more of the backbone of this skeletal redux. Flavorless, frequently humorless and lacking kinetic and comical anarchy, "Ghostbusters: Afterlife" feels more like a dim "Goosebumps" movie than "Ghostbusters."
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