Free Republic

t's the film fans have been waiting decades for. And today, the first trailer for the hotly-anticipated Ghostbusters re-boot was finally released. But while many praised the hilarious clip, showing Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones battling New York's supernatural nasties, some have complained that the film is falling back on racial stereotypes. That's because, while the white leads, McCarthy, Wiig and McKinnon, play brilliant engineers, professors and scientists, Jones' character is a simple NYC subway worker.

What I watched for the next two hours was mostly a tragic underutilizing of four of this country's funniest women — Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon as the evil-ectoplasm battlers of the title, fighting to save a New York that is played primarily by Boston — combined with what felt like the world's longest laser-tag game. the main performers rarely get to display their individual idiosyncratic strengths. It's particularly dispiriting to hear McCarthy, one of the most floridly gifted verbal riffers in comedy, have to utter frat-brah catchphrases like "Let's do this." That kind of lifeless,...