Ghostbusters Reviews: 10 Reactions You Need To Know

You'd think that Bill Murray popping up as a paranormal debunker would have had people cheering in the aisles, or Dan Aykroyd making an appearance as a jaded cab driver would have sent shockwaves of nostalgia around the theatre.

Not so, according to the early reviews: the overall consensus regarding the film's inevitable cameo appearances, of which there are many (pretty much the entire cast of the original film appears), mark them out as somewhat unnecessary and distracting - especially since the film does such an admirable job of being its own thing.

As Peter Debruge writes in Variety, "[the] cameos undercut the new film’s chemistry," and he's just one of many critics who found the old cast members popping up slightly awkward. Scott Mendleson of Forbes felt that "one awful extended cameo single-handedly kills the film’s momentum," which is a pretty brutal assessment.

Then there's this dooming nugget, from HitFix's Drew McWeeny:

"If you’d told me that the worst thing about a new Ghostbusters film would be Bill Murray, I would have laughed in your face. And yet… here we are."

Maybe it would have been better for this incarnation of Ghostbusters to avoid all the self-referential "oh, look, it's the guy from the older movie!" moments?