Ghostbusters: Afterlife Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

3. It's WAY Too Long

For some Gozer-forsaken reason, every film in the Ghostbusters franchise to date has been longer than the one before it, and while the 2016 film clocked in at a grossly overdone 116 minutes, Afterlife one-ups it with a sheer slog of a 125-minute runtime.

Ideally, a Ghostbusters movie should be a breezy sprint from start to finish, packed with rat-a-tat character-driven humour and nutty supernatural action, but there are countless scenes in this film that are neither funny nor action-packed at all.

There's a strange solemnity to many of the more melodramatic asides involving Egon's (Harold Ramis) mysterious past and death, and while some are surely necessary in teeing up the film's emotional payoff, much of it also feels like leaden dead weight.

A solid 20 minutes of awkward jokes and laboured chit-chat could easily be trimmed from this thing without harming it at all - in fact, quite the opposite. Sometimes less is more, and that absolutely would've been the case here.