Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire — Review Thread

It actually wasn't that bad, especially in comparison to the gag-inducing Afterlife.  This one felt a little more in the spirit of the original two movies, with a goofy plot about an ancient ghost returning, even though the design of said ghost was boring.  The return of the actual Ghostbusters felt a little more natural here, and no flogging of the dead Egon-horse present.  The Phoebe character is pretty irritating though and the conflict with her does bring the movie down.  But Kamal Nanjiani is hilarious and was an unexpected but really fun addition.

Still a really dumb title though.

5.5/10

I skipped Ghostbusters: Afterlife when it came out in theaters in late 2021. That was a decision that was partly the result of the pandemic. We were going through one of those variant surges at the time, and while there were movies I was still willing to mask up and go to during those conditions, that highly questionable franchise reboot wasn’t one of them. I did see the discourse around the movie, which was largely negative, firstly because a lot of people viewed the movie as something of a capitulation to the people who were shitty on the internet about the all-female 2016 Ghostbusters remake and secondly out of a generalized backlash to nostalgia pandering in Hollywood movies. That first objection seemed unfair firstly because Ghostbusters: Afterlife was plenty female and diverse itself and secondly because the film was made by Ivan Reitman’s son and did feel like a somewhat sincere tribute on some level. I was, however, a little more persuaded by that second objection when I finally saw it, which was ironic given that the movie actually did change quite a bit about the series formula in terms of setting and tone. Like, people would deride the movie’s unoriginality while also complaining that it didn’t faithfully recreate that movie’s comedic sensibility, which are kind of contradictory complaints. That’s not to say I particularly liked the movie because I didn’t, but I didn’t hate it either, it kind of just seemed like a garden variety 2020s Hollywood legacy sequel that had some fun moments combined with some cringe ones. Three years later we’re getting a sequel and in some ways the culture war complaints about the previous movie feel like old news now, but the nostalgia complaints see as alive as ever and audiences seem to now agree given the way they’re responding to things like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, so I’m not sure how this is going to be received. Personally I probably would have skipped it as well had it come out in a busy November again, but they wisely put it out during an early spring dead zone where my standards of what I’m going to give a watch are a lot lower so I decided to give it a go.

The movie begins two years after the events of Ghostbusters: Afterlife and the now blended family form that movie has moved to New York and set up shop in the fire station from the first movie and begun busting ghosts again funded by Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), one of several paranormal investigation operations he’s invested in. Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) and Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon) are not officially married yet but Grooberson has been slowly becoming something of a stepdad to Tevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace). As tends to be the case ghost busting remains a controversial activity in New York and after a dangerous incident the optics of bringing teenagers along to paranormal incidents become an issue for the family. Trevor, having recently turned eighteen is still able to go along but the decision is made that they need to leave Phoebe behind to avoid litigation, much to her discontentment. Feeling left behind she starts to form a friendship with a teenage ghost she meets in the park, little does she know that this teenage ghost is part of an elaborate plan by an ancient deity to escape from containment and unleash a frozen destruction upon the world.

The other big complaint about Ghostbusters: Afterlife is that it pandered too much to nostalgia. Personally I didn’t think it was too much more guilty of this than the likes of Star Wars: The Force Awakens or Top Gun: Maverick but I’m not going to say the whole “resurrecting Harold Ramis with CGI” thing wasn’t cringe. This sequel doesn’t have anything as egregious as that in it but it does still feel the need to go back to the Slimer and Stay Puft Marshmello Man well in sub-plots and there’s also a very dumb callback to the library ghost. These are silly, but I feel like a certain amount of this was always going to come with continuing this franchise and none of it went too far over the line in my view. The bigger problem is probably just that while these new characters aren’t “bad” per se I don’t think any of them have really caught fire. Paul Rudd is mostly wasted here and Carrie Coon doesn’t have much to do here either. The “kid” characters here also don’t really have that much going for them on paper though the young actors playing them do have enough charm to kind of coast on. The side characters fare a bit better in places and there’s a potentially interesting sub-plot here about the Phoebe character potentially befriending (perhaps even having a crush on) a teenage ghost, which maybe doesn’t get used to its full potential but does keep things at least a little interesting. All in all, the movie is pretty “mid,” but it did keep my attention and you can do worse as far as mid-spring studio programmers go. At the same time though, I don’t feel that inclined to give the movie a total “pass” either. It’s something that aims for mediocrity and achieves it and I’m not sure I entirely want to award that.