Scary for all the wrong reasons

“Ghostbusters” director Paul Feig has been fitted for a halo because he remade the 1984 comedy of the same name with four women (one of them even a woman of color!) instead of four men. The premature applause has since given way to backlash from those hardcore fans of Ivan Reitman’s 80’s oeuvre, shocked that Feig would play so fast and loose with what has been retroactively deemed a classic film. How dare he offend the sanctity of Dan Aykroyd’s acting!

People shouldn’t be offended because women play the major roles; they should be offended because the movie is bad. Following the model of the recent release “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” - less a remake than a rehash - the film retains the shape of an outmoded style that cyclically returns to relevance (like bell bottoms or the electoral college).

The thin plot of “Ghostbusters” begins when real ghosts are spotted in New York, and doctors of the paranormal Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) and Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) reunite from “Bridesmaids.” Wiig is condemned again to be the straight one and McCarthy should have been given much more rope to do her thing-where was her ranting, improvisational brilliance?

The film’s African-American character, Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), is also a brilliant scientist because in the 30 years since the original “Ghostbusters” we’ve seen great growth in the breadth of roles available to women of color… oh wait, she doesn’t play a scientist, she plays the street smart MTA token-taker because this film has zero boldness and reinforces negative racial stereotypes even as it pretends to empower.

Speaking of which, there’s Dr. Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon), a spectral weapon maker who is almost but not quite explicitly a lesbian because the budget of this film is $114 million and at that price you can’t risk offending any potential ticket buyers. Holtzmann says she, “Didn’t get any” at the Chelsea Hotel - was she talking about ghosts or something else? Well, it’s too much effort to explore, so she mostly dispenses antic looks and sticks out her tongue at Yates and Gilbert.

Perhaps as a further sign of the film’s noxious “girl power,” the crew hires a mimbo receptionist called Kevin (Chris Hemsworth), who wears glasses without lenses in them and is full of gems like, “An aquarium is a submarine for fish.” Wiig has an inexplicable lustiness toward the lug that is only tentatively explored. This is because character development is always coming to a halt so that the film can march through de rigueur cameos of the original Ghostbusters: Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson show up (Harold Ramis had the poor form to die before he could be shoehorned in).

The women are trying to bust Rowan North (Neil Casey), a ginger busboy trying to release thousands of “Class 4 Malevolent Apparitions” into New York because…he was bullied? The comedic material is weak, with a reliance on YouTube comments section jokes and riffs on Patrick Swayze’s phantom ceramicist in “Ghost.”

Feig, who was 22 years old when the original “Ghostbusters” came out, offers nothing besides self-reflexive, sarcastic asides larded around action sequences. The movie is another symptom of the deep, offensively inoffensive safety that plagues Hollywood, which can no longer even produce original mediocre films but instead lays palimpsests over audience nostalgia for older mediocre films.

“Ghostbusters” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated PG-13. Running time 1:56. Visit www.cinemawest.com.