Ghostbusters II

Skippable, and its reputation is harsher than it deserves. The structural fault is the one people name correctly: it opens by establishing that the events of the first film ended in lawsuits, a court injunction and bankruptcy, so the team is broke, discredited and performing at children's parties. A sequel whose first job is to reverse its predecessor's ending has spent its goodwill before it starts.

Nobody involved wanted to make it for years, and the eventual agreement to do so came with a script written to a deadline. It shows in the middle. The plot runs on a river of psychically reactive slime under the city, which is a decent idea used as a lever to get to a finale, and the villain is a painting.

What works is the texture rather than the plot. Peter MacNicol's Janosz is the funniest performance in either film, the courtroom sequence is better than anything in the last act of the original, and the slow slide of the team from disgrace back into municipal necessity is played with the same flat realism as before. The Statue of Liberty walking up Fifth Avenue is a worse idea than Stay Puft and it is staged with real affection.

Nothing requires it. Afterlife picks up the continuity thirty years later and leans almost entirely on the first film; what happens here is referred to in passing and never depended on. Watch it if you want more of these people in 1989, and expect a decent film rather than a good one.