Grade: C-

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of remaking 1980’s smash-hit high-tech scary comedy with a female cast, but doing so successfully would require a good deal more imagination and charm than director Paul Feig and his co-writer Katie Dippold bring to this bloated, remarkably unfunny retread, in which some of today’s most talented comic actresses are stuck trying to sell tepid material for nearly two hours. When even cameos by stars of the original “Ghostbusters”—Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Ernie Hudson and Sigourney Weaver—fall flat, you know the movie is in deep trouble.

Things actually begin fairly promisingly with Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig), a physics professor at Columbia, wigging out, if you’ll permit the pun, over her upcoming tenure review; the chair (Charles Dance) is a martinet who dismisses even a reference letter from Princeton as being not quite sufficient. But Gilbert’s chances are really put in danger when an anxious fellow (Ed Begley, Jr.) approaches her to investigate spectral phenomena at an old private home turned into a museum (a place introduced to visitors with some choice quips by a tour guide played by Zach Woods). He does so bearing a copy of a book on paranormal activity she co-authored years ago with her childhood pal Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) but has since tried to suppress as a youthful indiscretion. She’s horrified to discover it’s now for sale on Amazon.

Gilbert quickly looks up Yates, from whom she’s been estranged for a long while. Abby has continued her ghost-chasing from a spot in the basement of a school of low repute, where she works with Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon), an engineer as well as an obsessed spirit-hunter herself. When Gilbert tells her about the supposedly haunted old mansion, Abby promises to remove the book from the marketplace if Erin will gain them entrance to it. Their visit unleashes a family ghost from the place’s basement, and when Gilbert’s excited reaction hits social media, her professorship is over and she joins Yates and Holtzmann in their quest. The trio quickly becomes a femme foursome when they’re approached by NYC transit worker Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), who’s encountered a malevolent apparition in a subway tunnel and invites them to investigate it. The team gets a fifth quasi-member when they hire handsome but dumb-as-rock Kevin (Chris Hemsworth) as the receptionist in the office they establish above a Chinese restaurant.

From this point the movie devolves into a back-and-forth juxtaposition of scenes of the ghostbusters bickering and extravagant special-effects sequences in which they take on spirits being unleashed by a psycho janitor named Rowan (Neil Casey), who’s building up to opening a vortex that will unleash armies of nasty ghosts into the world. (One of the battles occurs at the rock concert.) There’s also a sub-plot about how the NYC mayor (Andy Garcia) and his officious aide (Cecily Strong) attempt to brand the busters as frauds in order to tamp down public panic, and a turn in the last hour toward demonic possession, first of Abby and then of Kevin; but these elements offer few laughs and simply weigh the picture down even more.

Needless to say, everything culminates in a huge special-effects battle in the streets of the Big Apple, involving huge malevolent parade balloons among other apparitions, that consumes nearly a full half-hour, though it seems to go on much longer; it’s reminiscent of the similar set-pieces that closed both “Pixels” and “R.I.P.D.”—and you can understand how desperate and dire the result is when it invites comparisons to those massive duds. There’s also a bit in which the possessed Kevin turns all the police and soldiers amassed against him into a “Thriller”-like dance formation that seems to presage a gigantic dance sequence, but it never happens, suggesting that the filmmakers decided not to pile on a mistake they’ve already made by overusing the familiar music from the first film (Theodore Shapiro’s score is overall no prize). Instead they just add more cheesy effects before intercutting some predictably stale gags into the final credits to end the picture with the suggestion that a sequel might be forthcoming.

Throughout the movie the four leads gamely give their all, but it’s to no avail. McCarthy has worked well with Feig in the past—“Spy” was genuinely funny—but here’s she’s just one-note shrill, and whatever chemistry the director engendered between her and Wiig in “Bridesmaids” is lacking here, especially since Wiig plays Erin like a goofy fifties schoolgirl, drooling over Hemsworth’s hunky Kevin in a way that destroys even the slightest hint of feminism at work. McKinnon tries to emulate the eccentricity Murray brought to the first film as the gadget-crazed Holtzmann but comes off mostly irritating, while Jones is trapped in the stereotype of the brazen African-American woman with ’tude, to which the shopworn thirties cliché of the black who responds with bug-eyed fear to any unexpected occurrence is added. Hemsworth flails about trying to pull off Kevin’s klutzy shtick, and isn’t much better when the character’s possession turns the character into a powerful, supremely confident ghostmaster. He seems ill-at-ease in either pose.

The rest of the cast doesn’t matter much, except for the cameos by the stars of the original that are noteworthy only by reason of the audience recognition they cultivate rather than any laughs they generate; this is essentially an effects extravaganza, and apart from the first couple ghost appearances, when Feig actually opts to scare us at an amusement-park level (the 3D adding to the impact), the visual explosion isn’t especially effective. That’s particularly the case in the big final confrontation, when there’s obviously an effort to fashion some pleasantly strange images (as well as reintroducing some old friends) among the ghosts, but it all comes off feeling tired and familiar. What was surprising and fresh in 1984 has become ho-hum and musty in the intervening thirty-two years, and the gender change isn’t handled cleverly enough to revive it.

It might be noted in passing that even the chronology of the signage in the culminating battle is a mess, making you wonder if this is supposed to be a period piece. Theatre marquees advertising both “Fists of Fury” and “Willard” suggest things are happening in 1971, but there’s also an advertisement for “Taxi Driver,” which was released five years later. And yet there are officials representing the Department of Homeland Security on hand to cause the heroines trouble. Maybe the intent is to suggest that “Ghostbusters” is happening in some sort of timeless neverland, but like so much else in this misguided reboot, it merely adds to the conclusion that the movie should never have happened at all.

Grade: C-

To make the point in terms fans of the first movie will understand, it would take more than a few sprays of Windex to fix Nia Vardalos’ script for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2,” a sequel that’s taken almost as long to reach the screen as “Zoolander 2,” and is only marginally better than that catastrophe. Members of the colorful Portokalos clan rarely leave their Chicago home, it appears; but the lesson of “Wedding 2”—and of the failed CBS spin-off sitcom “My Big Fat Greek Life” that lasted only seven episodes in 2003—is that while Vardalos can go home again, she shouldn’t have bothered, and certainly viewers would be well advised to skip this return trip.

The plot finds Toula (Vardalos) and hubby Ian (John Corbett), as well as many of her relatives, living in a series of suburban houses along a single street, all situated just down from that of her parents, crotchety Gus (Michael Constantine) and outgoing Maria (Lainie Kazan). She works at the family’s restaurant Dancing Zorba, and he’s the principal of the neighborhood high school where their daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris) is a senior, looking to enroll at a college far away from her clinging parents and suffocating clan—Gus in particular insists that she meet a Greek boy and get married before she’s “too old.”

It’s not Paris, however, who will wed by the time the new movie is over. In doing Internet research to prove that he’s a direct descendant of Alexander the Great (it’s the old fellow’s introduction to a computer—har, har!), Gus comes upon his marriage certificate from the old country, which he finds was not properly signed by the officiating priest. That means—horrors!—that he and Maria aren’t really married. And when his perhaps-wife learns the news, she decides to put off taking the vows again until Gus does her the honor of proposing properly, something the stubborn old goat refuses to do until a slapstick incident involving a bathtub induces him to profess his love once more. The balance of the picture involves everyone in the family chipping in to make their big, fat wedding a reality.

This premise of the marriage that wasn’t is certainly one of the hoariest in the Hollywood script playbook. It’s been used in scads of pictures, including Hitchcock’s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” in 1941. Resuscitating it here seems more an act of desperation than of inspiration. But Vardalos compounds the archaic feel by juxtaposing it with the effort of Toula and Ian to breathe new life into their own marriage, which has gone somewhat stale in the intervening years as work and parenting have taken their toll. That leads to some slapsticky efforts to reinsert spontaneity into their love life even as they’re absorbed in Gus and Maria’s situation. Frankly Vardalos and Corbett’s commitment to this portion of the tale comes across as halfhearted at best. And a further subplot about Paris’ college choice and her infatuation with cute classmate Bennett (Alex Wolff) doesn’t bring many rewards, either; a college-day sequence in the HS gym (featuring Rob Riggle as a recruiter from Northwestern) falls especially flat.

Still, fans of the first movie may be amused by Constantine’s antics, which are center-stage this time around, and by the take-charge attitude of Andrea Martin’s Aunt Voula, who revs things up with her willingness to say anything whenever the movie’s rhythm feels as though it’s going slack, which is pretty often. The down moments also invite cutaways to the dour figure of the family matriarch (Bess Meisler), whose mute reactions are always good for an easy laugh. But apart from a few moments of volubility, Kazan proves only fair, and little levity is provided by Louis Mandylor as Toula’s brother or by Gia Carides and Joey Fatone as her cousins. (A big revelation about the latter’s love life—and the family’s reaction to it—comes across as a patronizing attempt to drag what’s really a fifties-style ethnic sitcom into the modern world.) Even flatter are a sub-subplot involving a new couple to the neighborhood, played by John Stamos and Rita Wilson, the introduction of Gus’ stay-at-home brother (Mark Margolis)—whose toast to the drachma might cause some cringes, given Greece’s current economic crisis—and a trio of local harpies whose rude comments about the Portokalos clan act as the occasion for a supposedly heartfelt outburst by Toula that feels utterly artificial.

Directorial duties for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” have been turned over from Joel Zwick to Kirk Jones, who continues to prove that the charming quirkiness of “Waking Ned Devine” was a fluke; his work in this instance can barely be called adequate. The technical credits, from Jim Denault’s cinematography on down, are okay across the board, though not much more than what one would expect of a cable movie. Anybody looking for signs of the Chicago locale will be disappointed; this is another Toronto shoot.

Nostalgically-minded older views might find this a harmless way to spend a Sunday afternoon. But most will find it one wedding too many.