Review: 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' is too haunted by its franchise's history, and its fans' limited imaginations, to deliver anything truly exciting

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I gave up on “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” when I knew that director Jason Reitman had no intention of creating something original within the universe begun with his dad Ivan’s 1984 action comedy.

I’d say “spoiler alert” here, but it’s hard to spoil a moment that’s the focus of the movie’s marketing campaign. It’s the moment where They show up — and you know exactly who They are, because everything that Jason Reitman and his co-screenwriter, Gil Kenan, have laid in place sets us up for when They enter the picture.

It’s too bad, because the idea that starts this film showed the promise of taking the familiar franchise in an interesting direction — just as intriguing as director Paul Feig’s unfairly maligned 2016 variation, and with as much potential for laughs and excitement.

Callie (Carrie Coon) is a single mom with two sharp kids — perpetually mortified 15-year-old Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and 12-year-old science nerd Phoebe (McKenna Grace). The family is broke, and their last hope is an inheritance from Callie’s estranged and now deceased father: A dilapidated farm in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma. We are not supposed to know who Callie’s father was, though it’s pretty obvious just looking at Phoebe’s curly black hair and oversized eyeglasses.

The clues pile up when Phoebe finds a still-functioning PKE meter, which guides her to her grandfather’s underground workshop, where a proton pack awaits repairs. Meanwhile, Trevor goes out to the barn and finds a rundown old car — a Cadillac hearse with a familiar red circular logo on the doors and the ECTO-1 license plate.

These Easter eggs and many others will make the diehard “Ghostbusters” fans feel right at home. So will Paul Rudd’s appearance as a summer school teacher who provides plot exposition to tell Phoebe about the Manhattan ghost appearances of the 1980s, thwarted by the OG Ghostbusters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and the late Harold Ramis), whose videotaped exploits live forever on YouTube.

When Reitman focuses on the kids, the movie soars. There’s a great action set piece where Trevor is driving the Ecto-1, while Phoebe wields a proton pack from the vehicle’s gunner seat — a surprise to Phoebe’s ghost-obsessed new friend, Podcast (Logan Kim), as much as it is to us — as they chase a ghost through the streets of their new Oklahoma town. If the whole movie could be like that, this would be a fun and exciting thrill ride.

For a minute, even the grown-ups bring something to the table. Rudd does his patented funny Everyman thing, which still works like a charm. And Coon brings some real emotion to bear, dealing with her pent-up grief and anger at the father she never knew. But Coon and Rudd get sucked into the nostalgia machinery, starting when Rudd’s character is menaced by tiny marshmallow-based creatures in a WalMart.

The rabid fans of the original “Ghostbusters” won’t care — they get to see their beloved franchise just the way they like it, without trying to add anything fresh like the 2016 version where all the Ghostbusters were, gasp, women. That version, those fans declared, ruined their childhoods, but “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” does something worse: It traps those fans within their arrested childhoods, giving them everything they want and nothing they don’t expect.

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‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’

★★

Opening Friday, November 19, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for supernatural action and some suggestive references. Running time: 124 minutes.