“Frozen Empire” makes busting feel boring

Directed by Gil Kenan
Written by Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman
Based on Ghostbusters by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis
Starring Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Kumail Nanjiani, Patton Oswalt, Celeste O’Connor, Logan Kim, Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, Ernie Hudson, and Annie Potts

Upon its release in 2021, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was criticized for its reliance on nostalgia and its excessive reverence for the original film, and while I’d argue that the charming cast and story about the legacy left by absentee parents made up for that, it’s criticism that’s difficult to fully repudiate. You can only lovingly pan over a proton pack while the music swells so many times before people start to quirk an eyebrow. Three years on, Afterlife’s direct sequel, Frozen Empire, is less of a wholesale remake of Ghostbusters, and whatever else can be said of it, it feels like its own beast. Where Afterlife stuck too close to the original, this hurtles in the other direction. Ghostbusters has never run through this story before. It has never dealt with these themes before. And above all, it has never felt this bland and directionless before.

Director Gil Kenan (A Boy Called Christmas) has stated that the animated series The Real Ghostbusters stands as one of his strongest inspirations, and we must assume that he doesn’t just mean that Frozen Empire is as dull as that cartoon. Perhaps he instead means that he has stuffed his film to the gills with low-weight character drama the likes of which you are most likely to find in a filler episode of a mediocre sitcom That would certainly pose an explanation for the subplots on display here, which range from “Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) has to learn to be a stepdad” to “Trevor (Finn Wolfhard, Stranger Things) has a feud with Slimer,” a storyline so pointless that it was already cut from Ghostbusters II in 1986, where it would have centered on Rick Moranis’s Louis Tully, making Frozen Empire a film made up not just by pieces of other movies but by rejected pieces of other movies.

Some, like Dan Akroyd’s (Tammy) Ray Stantz and McKenna Grace’s (The Handmaid’s Tale) Phoebe Spengler are given actual material to wrestle with, but the emotion of their scenes is lost in the cavalcade of puerile nonsense coming from the rest of the movie. Grace, especially, was the best part of the previous film and she’s the best part of this one, as she ably communicates Phoebe’s frustrations with the way she’s underestimated due to her age in a genuinely heartfelt performance that should resonate with anyone who’s ever felt unappreciated. Akroyd, on the other hand, plays the opposite, as Ray deals with the idea that his golden years are in the past and the world has no place for him beyond running a YouTube channel with a child named Podcast (The Walking Dead: Dead City), a fate worse than death. Between the two of these, there’s almost something there about what we’ll do when we feel the things and people we care about most are leaving us behind. A more focused film could have drilled down into these to provide its story with a backbone and its audience with something to connect to. Here, both are truncated, lost in the slush so Finn Wolfhard can get slimed by Slimer not once but twice.

The narrative being too unfocused to be driven by any character, what passes for the story is filled with something that should be familiar to any frequent viewer of bad horror movies: random spooky crap. This is the lifeblood of horror schlock; if a writer wants their audience to think something is happening or will happen soon, but they haven’t quite eked their way over the line into feature length yet, the easiest solution is to show something vaguely foreboding happening while sinister music plays over top. Nothing has fundamentally changed, but the audience has re-engaged, and the writer has bought themselves time before the climax. To be clear, this is something that any horror movie does, including the original Ghostbusters. It’s part of building tension, but if the time bought isn’t being filled meaningfully, then a line has been crossed from a slow burn into viewers being strung along. An audience can only be promised something is just around the corner for so long before they start wondering when the hell they’ll be rounding that corner and what it’s all for. In the case of Frozen Empire, the answer to that question is a sky beam in the Year of Our Lord 2024.

Any time Kenan runs up against the fact that he does have to advance his story, he and cowriter Jason Reitman (The Front Runner) do so in the most contrived ways possible. Characters and powers are invented out of thin air or disappear just as fast. Basic object permanence and continuity is disregarded. Some of these things, such as the way the main villain is finally unleashed upon the world, aren’t even necessarily worthless on its own and could have added a sense of dread to the proceedings as we watch people we care about walk into a trap whose dimensions we already know and fear, but Kenan throws it out with as much thought put into the execution as went into the conception.

Just as shrugged off as the pace is the comedy that should be the cornerstone of a Ghostbusters movie. Instead, it barely features, and when it does, it comes in the form of the easiest joke available at the time. Nowhere is this more evident than in the first present-day scene, which really sets the stage for the way the movie that follows will constantly leave its viewers wondering, “Did ChatGPT write that line?” Newcomers to the franchise Kumail Nanjiani (Eternals) and Patton Oswalt (A.P. Bio) get some laughs – Oswalt especially delivers the funniest line of the entire film – but far more often, you’re left with a horror-comedy equally limp in both of those facets. Even the effects on the ghosts don’t work, but then, there are so few actual ghosts here that it’s hard to be too bothered by it.

Even divorced from the rest of Frozen Empire’s flaws, that lack of comedy speaks to the chief flaw of the thing. It isn’t just directionless; it barely seems to understand what made the original movie work beyond the iconography. Rather than take the time to write a story worthy of the franchise they pay lip service to loving, Kenan and Reitman would much rather make an embarrassing detour to the New York Public Library so a bit player and a ghost from the original can show up. They’d rather bring back Walter Peck (William Atherton, Clinical) so someone can call him “dickless” again. They’d rather once again feature loving shots of the OGs suiting up for the climax so they can bravely contribute by…working together to pull a single lever. Then, when it’s time for them to actually write something new, they can’t find anything to do with the characters that they themselves created. Their own creations add nothing to the movie beyond a vague memory that they were in the last one. By the time the reveal comes that the Ghostbusters aren’t the firefighters or exterminators that they’ve always (even here) paralleled but are, in fact, inheritors of the legacy of an ancient order of superpowered ghost hunters called the Fire Masters, it’s hard to muster the energy to roll your eyes.

Rating: C

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is now playing in theaters.