Toward the end of the new Ghostbusters movie (stop reading now if you don’t want to be spoiled about anything), a version of the classic Ghostbusters logo—the white will-o’-the-wisp thing that is usually circled and crossed out in red—comes alive and threatens to destroy New York City. Our heroes, played by Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones, have to fight him, a task that proves, in the end, surprisingly easy. I mention this because I think there’s some kind of metaphor here, about the new Ghostbusters doing battle with an oversized emblem of itself—a grotesque and cartoonish magnification of something that once seemed humble, simple. It was just a ghost in a circle, and now it’s this.

There’s been so much furor over this Ghostbusters reboot since it was announced, almost completely focused on the fact that all the leads are played by women. (And, indeed, the characters they play are women too.) So I went into the movie spoiling for a fight—I really wanted to like director Paul Feig’s reimagining, to prove all the misogynist online naysayers wrong. But Ghostbusters, quick and dull and weightless, offers very little to root for. It spends so much time doing battle with its legacy that it forgets to be its own movie, putting a talented cast to waste and marking another disappointment in this dreadful summer movie season.

What’s most mystifying about Ghostbusters is that its two leads, Wiig and McCarthy, have done such strong work in previous Feig films. He knows how to work with these terrific actors, to coax loose, funny, strange performances out of them. Presumably the goal of casting them in this was to make more of that same sly magic, only with a ghost story built around it. But both McCarthy and Wiig spend the entire movie on mute, turning in bland, disconcertingly joyless performances that further deaden an already lifeless movie.

Jones and McKinnon, playing backup, get a little more room to noodle around and do their thing. But Jones seem imported from a louder, brasher movie (probably one from the 1990s), while McKinnon does her McKinnon shtick, which works well enough in five-minute increments on Saturday Night Live but proves grating and incoherent in movie-length form. All four actresses have their moments—Wiig has a masterful eye twitch early on, McKinnon riffs hilariously with Andy Garcia (playing the mayor of New York) and Cecily Strong (as his nervous aide). But they never truly find the thread of the movie, and have a shocking dearth of chemistry together.

That might not be their fault. Feig, who co-wrote the movie with The Heat writer Katie Dippold, is overly concerned with plot, the film hurrying through reveals and exposition on its way toward an ending that feels like Feig saying, “There! I did it.” Feig and Dippold have created only a few moments for their actors to really breathe and play around. They seem hampered by what I’m guessing is a combination of studio pressure to focus on action and special effects, and a reflexive fear of the long shadow cast by the original film. There are so many nods to the original—fan service cues for applause—peppered throughout the new Ghostbusters, but all they really accomplish is making the viewer long for the old movie, with its weird verve and sparks of ingenuity.

A lot of hopes, and well north of $150 million, are pinned on Ghostbusters, and the film is smothered under those huge, quadrant-y expectations. Its climax is a muddled, overwrought mess, full of green-screen and senseless zapping. (McKinnon has a nice moment amidst all this, but it’s cheaply telegraphed by an overeager music cue.) I am not a die-hard fan of the original Ghostbusters, but I can at least appreciate that it’s more an admirably offbeat horror-comedy than it is an epic action movie. Feig’s Ghostbusters tries hard to prove its place in the modern world, and in the summer blockbuster season, by turning itself into an aimless spectacular. That feels like a wrong read of Ghostbusters, and drowns out any wit and charm the movie has managed to create.

That wit and charm does exist, mind you. Though it’s unfortunate to say about a women-led movie like this, Chris Hemsworth, playing the Ghostbusters’ hunky-dumb assistant, is easily the funniest part of the movie, his loopy job interview scene hinting at a better, more discursive, more improv-y film that could have been. Wiig plays off of him beautifully, as does the rest of the cast, and his scenes bounce with invigorating elan. The air goes out of the room when he leaves. Cecily Strong is also quite good, doing a great tweak on political P.R. smarm.

These are brief highlights in a film that’s largely an uninspired slog, everyone doing their best to get to the end without screwing things up too much. It’s a real bummer that these filmmakers felt they had to be so careful—with beloved I.P., with a female-driven movie. It’s the dumbest of ironies, really, that they do, in the end, seem pretty afraid of a ghost.