Ghostbusters Afterlife dug up a nice piece of nostalgia from my childhood, pulled the corpse from its coffin, and made it flop around in a barnyard while mouthing unfunny lines from its dead, withered lips. Yeah, it was that bad.
The story has a basic "next generation" setup. Egon Spengler has died, alone, in a ramshackle farm in the middle of nowhere. I would have cautioned spoiler alert, but if you don't pick up who it is and what's happening in the first ten minutes of the film, you're just not paying attention (for which you should be commended). Apparently, Egon had an estranged daughter, who, in turn, has a 15-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, Phoebe, the latter being something of a replica of her late grandfather. They're also poor, apparently. The family is evicted from a pretty nice looking apartment, drives in a new-looking car to Egon's farm (now theirs). Phoebe discovers a ghost in the farm, who leads her to her grandfather's underground lab. Paul Rudd, a seismologist who is substitute teaching in summer school gets hooked in with the family. Ghosts start to appear in the little farm town. The kids and a really annoying sidekick take it upon themselves to take up the ghostbusting trade. And the last 45 minutes basically replicates what happened in the last 45 minutes of the original Ghostbusters movie.
The story was ... well, there was no story. The entire script was a patchwork of scenes machinated together for the sole purpose of having kids do "ghostbuster stuff" in a rural setting. The dialogue was horrendous. There was nothing resembling an authentic human relationship between anyone, at any time, in any part of the movie. The acting felt flat, but I pin that more on the terrible script than on any of the actors. It was, in short, a bad movie.
The premise was a good idea. And the special effects were fantastic. But they can't make up for a seriously flawed script. Which made Ghostbusters Afterlife not much better than an afterthought.