The latest attempt to turn Ghostbusters into a legitimate franchise is basically your worst coworker. It’s lazy, stupid, and does everything it can to look busy while not actually doing much of anything. Just to remind everyone: We could be watching Dame Kate McKinnon acting like a total nutbar whilst slaying the supernatural. Instead, we have whatever Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is. And what it is, at best, is as lively as a corpse.
If you don’t remember Ghostbusters: Afterlife, it was basically the Star Wars-ification of the spooky-silly series. That is to say, the Spengler family got the Skywalker treatment. Callie (Carrie Coon), the daughter of OG ‘Buster Egon Spengler, and her daughter, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), and son, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), took up the mantle of ghostbuster by virtue of their very-special dorky bloodline. Phoebe’s teacher, Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), rounded out the quartet after romancing Callie in a particularly upsetting sequence that gets mentioned in this sequel just to twist the knife.
This time out, a demonic Poké Ball holding a chilly Slenderman-looking dude gets opened after Kumail Nanjiani sells it to Dan Aykroyd. Instead of any original idea, it’s just another “big bad guy wants to free all the ghosts and open up a portal” thing, except Kumail is a firebender, like from Avatar?
Bill Murray shows up to say like four half-assed one-liners. Patton Oswalt has to do like a solid 10-minute monologue of exposition. Phoebe develops feelings for the ghost of a teenaged girl, but because this is a Very Important Blockbuster Franchise for Sony, they can’t explicitly make it romantic. Instead, they opt for the “Schrodinger’s Lesbian” approach, thinking they can seem progressive by hinting at same-sex affection but avoid angering book banners by never confirming it. In reality, this just makes everyone mad!
That decision is really a microcosm for the macro-problems of Frozen Empire. In an effort to please everyone, it will satisfy no one. The film is overloaded with unnecessary characters shoehorned in to either satisfy nostalgia or provide Finn Wolfhard fans with more Finn Wolfhard. Carrie Coon has like five lines of dialogue. Unacceptable! Her biggest character development was wearing a Chicago Cubs shirt in one scene. Respect! Paul Rudd also gets like 3 minutes of screentime, but he’ll be fine.
As a sign of just how bloated the thing is with needlessly included humans, the climax features a whole bunch of people pulling a lever together while a whole bunch of other people hold onto a proton pack together. How does a concept this rich get turned into this tepid, boring gibberish. It’s a movie about friggin’ ghosts and so much of it is just people talking and talking and talking, explaining nonsense that nobody could possibly care about.
There’s not one scene in which anybody even jokes about how the entire world is just completely cool with confirmation that ghosts are real and there is thus some kind of afterlife. That’s not a plot hole, though there are plenty of those too, but it’s a wildly missed opportunity. As is not using Carrie Coon and giving Dan Aykroyd so much to do. Is there some big Aykroyd fanbase being serviced? Are they bigger than the Wolfhard fans? Will there be some kind of war between Aykheads and Wolfhard-diehards?
Fitting for a film that chose to go for a visual theme involving ice, I will say the coldest thing that can be said about a movie: It isn’t even worth hating. It is irrelevant, inert, and as incorporeal as the least effective poltergeist.
Grade = C-
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Amy Nicholson at The New York Times says “It’s all pleasant enough in a warm-bath-of-ectoplasm kind of way that by the time things wound around to the familiar sight of the Ghostbusters engulfed in a throng of cheering civilians, I felt a flush of futility that I’d bothered to question any of the confusion that herded us toward the inevitable.”
Murjani Rawls at Substream Magazine says “The Ghostbusters franchise has found itself in a holding pattern, like many beloved properties experiencing the same growing pains. How do you service the past while not packing so much into the future that each element drowns out the others? This is a tricky balance to strike, and Frozen Empire isn’t able to manage it.”
Kristy Puchko at Mashable says “This army of characters is too much for the film to substantially support, and so many of the roles feel little more than guest appearances. They offer no arc but chances to cheerfully dump exposition or movie science babble and on rare occasion a punchline.”