If there are chills to be had, then that means there are either spooks about or temperatures dropping, and the latest from Sony’s busting bonanza has ample amounts of both. The aptly titled “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” has the gang of scientific specter wranglers taking on an ancient threat that wants to freeze New York City over. It also has them taking on bloated scripts, an overload of characters, and truly an abundance of remarkably in-depth lore.
The film picks up a few years after the events of “Afterlife” and sees the extended Spengler family, consisting of Pheobe, played by Mckenna Grace (“Gifted,” “Troop Zero”), Callie, played by Carrie Coon (“The Leftovers,” “Gone Girl”), and Trevor, played by Finn Wolfhard (“Stranger Things,” “IT (2017)”), as well as Gary, played by Paul Rudd (“Ant-Man,” “Wet Hot American Summer”), busting ghosts in New York City under the advisement of Winston, played by Ernie Hudson (“Oz,” “Congo”). After an ancient orb that seems to contain an evil frost spirit falls into the possession of Ray, played by Dan Akroyd (“Trading Places,” “The Blues Brothers”), the city falls under threat as the gang must band together again to stop the incoming danger.
Overall, there’s a very episodic sort of feeling to the general events of the film. Like a season of television condensed into a two-hour movie, with payoffs to previous events and escapades coming in the last ten minutes or so. There’s Trevor hunting a spirit living in the firehouse attic, Pheobe and Ray bonding over being ostracized by their friends and family, Gary trying to fill a fatherlier role in Trevor and Phoebe’s life, as well as the typical “save the world” and “stop the mayor from shutting us down” plots. There’s a lot going on and the script written by director Gil Kenan (“Monster House,” “City of Ember”) and Jason Reitman (“Juno,” “Up In The Air”) feels more than a little stuffed. It’s not just plots either, as there are plenty of other characters squeezed into the plot.
We have the return of Bill Murray (“Caddyshack,” “Rushmore”) and Annie Potts (“Young Sheldon,” “Pretty in Pink”) as Peter and Janine, respectively, Patton Oswalt (“Ratatouille,” “The Sandman”) as a librarian obsessed with spiritual and ancient machinations, Kumail Nanjiani (“Silicon Valley,” “The Big Sick”) as Nadeem, a possibly haunted human who becomes an object of Peter and Ray’s fascinations, James Acaster (“Hypothetical,” “Cinderella (2021)”) as Lars, a scientist working with the Ghostbusters, and Emily Alyn Lind (“Gossip Girl (2021),” “The Babysitter”) as Melody, a ghost girl Pheobe strikes up a friendship with, as well as returning characters from “Afterlife.”
There’s plenty going on and not all of it receives the attention it needs to be compelling or thoroughly fleshed out. Also, while the “Ghostbusters” series has always had cruder and more innuendo-based jokes, there’s something very awkward and uncomfortable about having the main source of those jokes in this particular film not be any of the original cast or the adults at all, but instead one of the teenage girls, and those jokes are constant.
Without a doubt, the brightest spots in the film are anything involving Grace’s Pheobe. She’s clearly the star of this new series of sequels, and this film cements that without a doubt. She’s the most compelling from a character perspective, and her journey is also the most interesting from a storytelling perspective. Whereas the rest of the group can either underutilized, Grace gets the right balance of silliness and seriousness, especially with her subplot involving Alyn Lind’s ghost girl Melody. Akroyd also gets to shine, finally embracing the weirder more obsessive bits of Ray in a way that’s undeniably compelling, and his scenes alongside Hudson are great. It really does feel like two lifelong friends together again, instead of two performers.
At one point during the production, Kenan mentioned being directly inspired by the various Ghostbuster animated series, and that’s very apparent in numerous aspects of the film. From the creatures’ designs to the larger scale destruction/doom-and-gloom of it all, there’s a very Saturday morning cartoon vibe to everything. This does mean that the film loses even more of the comedic tone that the original two films had. Love them or hate them, they were still comedies first and foremost, and this film continues the trend “Afterlife” started by having the films feel less and less like comedies and more like action films with comedic elements sprinkled throughout. “Frozen Empire” is clearly having more fun than “Afterlife” but it comes at a cost.
The film just feels like diminishing returns. This is the fourth time, at least, that we’ve seen the Ghostbusters publicly save the world, and yet the mayor and city still treat them like random vigilantes. It’s the third time we’ve “discovered” Slimer and yet we still act as if he’s some random ghost causing mayhem. So many of the plot beats feel repeated from previous films, and they’d be overstaying their welcome even if the film didn’t have eight plots happening all at once.
“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” certainly isn’t the worst blockbuster out this year or in the last decade. But it's disheartening to see a series that used to be packed with such genuine funny and anarchic energy be reduced to franchise fodder, complete with big CGI villains and overstuffed plots. It’s a fun enough time, bolstered by Mckenna Grace and any of the chunks focused on her, but the rest of the film struggles to rise above mediocrity. It’s a spooky series that’s missing the soul. 3/5
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