RichardLess wrote: ↑December 25th, 2022, 11:28 pm Everytime I see Mckenna Grace I get more and more impressed by her performance in Afterlife. I don’t mean this in a mean way but there isn’t a shred of Pheobe anywhere on her. Mckenna seems bubbly and outgoing, the polar opposite to Phoebe. Meanwhile Logan Kim was very much like his character. I think she was really overlooked.
I rewatched Afterlife yesterday and something clicked for me that hadn’t in previous outings. It’s still a hot mess in the final act but I enjoyed it a lot more. I think the problematic ending and the GB’s showing up kinda play a trick on the viewer. It’s so overwhelming see the guys again, so jarring almost, that you kinda forget about the real movie.
The key character to unlocking the movie for me wasn’t the kids or the GB’s. It was Carrie Coon. This poor mother at the end of her rope with 2 kids to look after. There’s a sadness there but also a resilience & strength. Plus how good is her delivery of “there better be a bar” lol. She’s witty as hell.
And…I kind of have a bit of a crush on her. Her chemistry with Paul Rudd? Wow. Off the charts. I could watched just a movie with those two courting each other.
I agree about McKenna's acting in the film; originally, she was apparently playing the role too drily and Jason wanted her to put more of her own personality in. For example, Phoebe's enthusiasm about her own jokes is charmingly funny. There's that great little moment when Podcast laughs at her polar bear joke, and she's so happy about it and responds that "it's a pretty hilarious joke..." That bubbly personality does come through a bit in moments like that, and it also reflects how Egon was in the originals (particularly GBII) without just making her a carbon copy.
As more time goes on, I think that Jason made the right choice to make this more of a Goonies-style 80s-esque film. The humor isn't the same type as in the originals, but its humorous moments are genuinely funny, and the movie has a lot of heart. It mostly struggles when bringing Gozer back in. Too much time is spent trying to shoehorn the whole Gozer/terror dog mechanic into the movie, resulting in weird plot holes and wasted time. A "simpler" villain, even like Ivo Shandor, would have worked just fine. The whole (sorely underdeveloped) backstory about the family and the team's breakup also involved some questionable choices, and I wish that Janine wasn't mostly written out of the movie.
Invisible Ghost Egon also had a bit more potential. I totally understand not wanting to overuse the character, but there were times when they could have used him a little more. For example, we know that he's in the room when Callie is about to get possessed by Zuul, but there's NO indication of a reaction/panic/anything? The closest the movie seems to get to that is when the kids walk in and find Zuul/Callie there, and the PKE meter switches on and goes to taser mode "by itself." I originally thought that it was just on because it was reacting to Zuul, but I think it only engages
after the kids walk in (it was next to Callie the whole time), implying that Egon might have switched it on just then.