Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire 🚫👻🥶 REVIEW/RANT:

When the discovery of an ancient artifact unleashes an evil force, Ghostbusters new and old must join forces to protect their home and save the world from a second ice age. I’m going to be completely honest in saying that the only Ghostbusters movies I care for are the first two. I thought the 2016 female led Ghostbusters movie was quite terrible and I am in the minority that felt 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife was just cheap nostalgia bait mediocrity, so indulgent in its own self important sentimentality. Now, it’s not as if I was all that excited for this sequel to Afterlife, seeing as how I wasn’t a fan of that film, but the marketing gave me some semblance of hope for a mildly good time, combining the legacy characters with the new recruits for an adventure of thrills and chills. Coming out of the movie, I can confidently say that this is just another classic case of false advertisement. 

The first hour of Frozen Empire is truly quite rough to get through and focuses heavily on McKenna Grace’s character Phoebe who I did not care about in the last movie, and was even more annoyed with in this one. I felt zero attachment to her character and she even has a flirtatious relationship with this female ghost that was so close to crossing the line into a full blown underage lesbian romance. Although they did not kiss, it was still very suggestive and I don’t know why they had to be 16 years old. There is a strong case to be made, particularly from concerned parents, that there is subliminal messaging in many modern movies and shows to influence young impressionable minds. That of course, is a discussion for another time. Nonetheless, take away all of that, I still did not feel any connection to her, Finn Wolfhard’s character or any of the younger cast members. 

The movie is painfully predictable in its formula and the average viewer would be able to see 90 percent of the jokes or nostalgic moments coming from a mile away. Right from the opening scene with the young Ghostbusters and Paul Rudd going around in the Ectomobile firing CGI lasers at ghosts and cracking jokes, I knew exactly what type of movie this was going to be: A Marvel movie, and not the good kind. It has all of the cringy jokes, tonal inconsistencies, lazy fan service, and cartoonish acting that have plagued the worst MCU movies. I don’t know why just about every modern franchise feels the need to copy the same old recycled story beats, tired gags, and convoluted narratives from movies that have done it better. Even Paul Rudd, who I love, is basically playing Scott Lang from the Ant-Man movies here and I just don’t buy him as this “dad” of Phoebe like I buy him as a dad in the MCU. 

This movie has far too many characters and they were all crammed into an incoherent mess of a story revolving around this magical orb MacGuffin thingy. It’s like director Gil Kenan and writer Jason Reitman threw together a bunch of half baked ideas with potentially interesting lore regarding the villain and squashed it together with a bunch of disjointed sequences of the Ghostbusters espousing mostly unfunny jokes, going on exposition dumps, and making winks to the past in hopes that some of it would land with the audience. Even the jump-scares were so predictable. Music/sound goes silent, character investigates thinking it’s a ghost, cutsie ghost comes out, character sighs in relief, and five seconds later the cutsie ghost turns scary and startles the character. There is nothing fresh or nuanced to any of it. Found myself rolling my eyes on more than one of those occasions. 

For me, I genuinely laughed out loud about three times throughout the entire movie, and two of those laughs can be attributed to Bill Murray, who is plastered all over the marketing and yet has less than ten minutes of screen time. Dan Ackroyd is the only member of the original cast who looks like he’s having a good time, with Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts playing caricatures of their classic characters. I’m so serious when I say that Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman does practically nothing for the 8 minutes of screen time he does have and looks mentally checked out. After all, it’s just another easy paycheck for him to collect so that Sony can use the trailers and posters to bait fans of the original movies into paying 25 bucks for a ticket. 

Kumail Nanjiani is in this movie, or is he? His entire presence consisted of jumbled exposition and poorly written juvenile jokes that completely undercut any sort of feeling of tension or stakes. He even has a “superpower” of sorts in which he can control fire and it was so utterly ridiculous and made me wonder if Hollywood needs to go back to having a writer’s strike. It sounds stupid when I say it but it’s even more absurdly dumb when you see it. In terms of aspects I enjoyed, there are far fewer than I would have liked. Bill Murray has a couple of funny moments, Dan Ackroyd looks to be enjoying himself, and although the icy ghost villain has virtually zero development, he was pretty menacing and scary, for the ten minutes he’s actually in the movie. You know, it’s 2024 and for some reason the CGI lasers, ghosts, and creatures in this movie look straight out of a video game. 

Before I conclude this review, I’m just going to be completely honest in saying that I get it. I get why movie theaters are dying and why the common man doesn’t want to spend their hard earned money on entertainment that consistently fails to meet their expectations. When I saw the film last night, I talked to the management at my local Regal theater. They told me the truth. They are not making enough money to stay open for much longer and as heartbreaking and painful as it is for me to say, I GET IT. Mainstream blockbusters are simply not generating the same revenue they used to and it is a result of too many bloated and uninspired franchises, spinoffs, sequels, reboots, and remakes that use the same MCU-esque formula and get milked to oblivion to the point that even the most devoted fans have had enough. Of course, there are exceptions, like the recently fantastic Dune sequel, but it’s the lack of consistent quality content that is turning away the common viewer. Overall, with a lazy script, mostly unfunny jokes, uninteresting new characters, and a frustrating lack of Bill Murray’s Venkman, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is further proof that some classics simply don’t need generic and unnecessary legacy sequels.