Ghostbusters II (1989)

Film: Ghostbusters II (1989)

Stars: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Peter MacNicol

Director: Ivan Reitman

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sigourney Weaver: click here to learn more about Ms. Weaver (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We'll talk more about her initial breakthrough with audiences with 1979's Alien next week, but essentially that film changed Sigourney Weaver's life.  Reviews of the SciFi horror film were initially mixed, but it didn't matter-the movie became an absolute blockbuster, the sixth highest-grossing first-run movie of 1979, and Weaver was now poised to become a household name as a leading woman, which she would stay for pretty much the entire run of the 1980's.  This isn't necessarily because she was a huge box office draw.  Movies like Half Moon Street and Deal of the Century were not hits, and even a critically-acclaimed, well-regarded picture like The Year of Living Dangerously wasn't a huge earner despite starring one of the most consistent box office performers of the 1980's Mel Gibson, and one of her biggest hits (Working Girl) she was third-billed after Harrison Ford & Melanie Griffith.  In fact, like a lot of the action stars we've profiled this season, Weaver was buoyed by two film franchises in terms of her box office appeal to studios while underwhelming otherwise.  The first, Alien, we'll discuss more next week, but the second was an action-comedy franchise that had her fighting (or well, busting) ghosts.  As I had seen the first film in this series before this season, and we always talk about movies that are new to me, we'll get into the sequel, and the one gap I had before this year in the Ghostbusters franchise.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place five years after the destruction of New York in the form of Gozer (aka the Stay Puft Marshmallow man) and are being sued by the city for the damages, the public quickly dismissive of the need for the Ghostbusters.  All of the men are now on their own paths, with Ray (Aykroyd) & Winston (Hudson) serving as children's entertainers, Egon (Ramis) running experiments on human emotions (side note: did not realize until watching this movie that the "Duncan Principle" from the first season of Community, one of my all-time favorite shows, was a direct reference to Ghostbusters II), and Peter (Murray) hosting a talk show about psychics.  All of this is happening while Dana (Weaver) has become a mom (and is since divorced...it's not Peter's kid), and is working on an art exhibit that features Vigo the Carpathian, a powerful magician & tyrant who, of course, is haunting his painting and controlling Dana's boss Janosz (MacNicol).  This all leads to some initial ghosts being released (the lawsuit comes down really fast when spirits invade the courtroom during the trial) and ends with an equally ridiculous ending to the beginning, with the Statue of Liberty being anthropomorphized by green slime and then Vigo being defeated by the power of...love.

I know that last sentence sounds like a joke, but it's real.  In a sign of some of the corny places that Reitman's career would go in the coming years (as a general rule I find his filmmaking underwhelming save for Dave), positive emotions and a united city are what truly defeat Vigo from destroying everyone in his path.  This is, of course, about as good of an indictment on what would happen to the movies in the 1980's during the Reagan Era, but also it is a testament to a film whose grosses demanded a sequel but didn't really want to be funny.  Despite a host of comedic talents on the call sheet, the best line in the movie is uttered by Cheech Marin in a one-line cameo (the ghost ship of the Titanic comes to the New York harbor and he says "better late than never"...it works really well in the moment).  But otherwise this is a comedy without jokes, and an action film that eschews most of the best action sequences with its schmaltzy ending.

The movie would make a lot of money, though nowhere near the amount of the first one, and would then enter development hell as the stars (but specifically) Bill Murray would not want to do a third go-around.  Despite three sequels, all of which included some of the cast (including a really tacky postmortem performance from Harold Ramis using CGI & body doubles), the entire cast, and most specifically Rick Moranis, has never re-teamed to make another Ghostbusters and given Ramis's death, never will.  Then again, if this was the best they could do, maybe they would've been better off leaving it as is, though for our Star of the Month, the film would result in a three-year hiatus until her next picture...which we'll discuss next week.