Paul Rudd stars in the aggressively wistful Ghostbusters: Afterlife

When Ghostbusters came out in 1984, I was 12. I loved it. I first danced with a girl at a school disco that year to the deathless theme tune by Ray Parker Jr. Usually I wouldn’t bring such personal history to a film review, but your response to the aggressively wistful Ghostbusters: Afterlife may depend on the strength of your connection to the original. The (latest) sequel has been made by Jason Reitman, son of Ivan, director of the first film. A misty eye pervades. The movie yearns to bring together Generations X, Z and boomers too in something other than a dislike for millennials.

The link to the past is made soon enough and from there, incessantly. (Cue marshmallows.) But we open by exiting the frantic Manhattan in which the earliest busting took place. Instead, single mother Callie (Carrie Coon) and her teenage children make a new home in Oklahoma, a creaking farmstead left to them by the kids’ estranged grandfather. (You can start to guess the rest.) “Oh my God, this is so much worse than I thought it was going to be,” announces the smart-mouthed older brother, Reitman tempting fate.

As new adventures begin, the movie is not as bad as all that. But it is an odd creation, giving middle-aged nostalgics equal parts fan service and touchy-feeliness. As a proxy for the target audience, Paul Rudd co-stars as a slumming summer school teacher, bonding with the family’s daughter over geometry jokes. “I thought you were being obtuse,” she tells him. Still, at the screening I went to, it wasn’t until the sight of a ghost — a slimy bugaboo in the vein of the original — that I heard an actual child laugh.

What they made of the in-jokes and emoting only they could tell you. Your own inner 12-year-old may miss New York and a real movie for kids. Your adult self? They might just feel old.

★★★☆☆

In UK and US cinemas from November 19