It isn’t really clear who the Ghostbusters franchise is for anymore. In Jason Reitman’s 2021 sequel/reboot, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, it seemed like the series had a clear trajectory, and that he was aiming at finally making it the kids’ franchise that Halloween costume companies always dreamed it could be. But the latest entry, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, clings so tightly to the franchise’s past that it’s hard to see how it could appeal to anyone at all.
Frozen Empire is a direct sequel to Afterlife, with the Spengler family — Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), her mother Callie (Carrie Coon), brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and Callie’s maybe-now-boyfriend? Greg (Paul Rudd), busting ghosts in New York City. It isn’t really clear how long they’ve been doing this, but after they do one job, the family is quickly shut down by the city’s mayor, former Environmental Protection agent Walter Peck (William Atherton, returning from the 1984 Ghostbusters, because nothing in this franchise is allowed to age gracefully).
When Atherton appears, the movie pauses so Reitman can congratulate himself on roping in yet another Ghostbusters legacy character. He’s practically begging for fans to applaud. Even more off-putting, though, is that the new cast reacts like they’ve seen the original movie too. They roll their eyes at his tantrums, somehow perfectly understanding his yearslong vendetta against the Ghostbusters, as if to say the family is in on the joke with us.
Image: Sony Pictures
This bizarre relationship with and reverence for the franchise’s history plagues the movie at every turn. Surviving ’80s Ghostbusters Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) show up again, but it’s less clear than ever why exactly they’re in this story. While their purpose in Afterlife seemed like clear torch-passing, now that the action has moved back to New York City, they just seem to be part of the gang. In fact, they seem to have nearly as much screen time as any of the new Ghostbusters — save for Phoebe, who Grace manages to turn into one of Frozen Empire’s few genuine bright spots. But all that screen time for the old stars just goes to waste.
Once some of the funniest actors in Hollywood, the gang is now an over-the-hill band that’s become indistinguishable from its cover acts. Aykroyd, Murray, and Hudson know the material here isn’t great, and they certainly aren’t interested in elevating it. They’re all giving “I get paid either way” performances of the highest order. And who can blame them, when so much of the movie’s script, written by Reitman and director Gil Kenan (Monster House), is dedicated to explaining its labyrinthian plot?
Outside of a couple brief moments of ghostly activity, the rest of the movie’s dialogue is devoted to having characters explain new Ghostbusting tech or Patton Oswalt’s librarian character explicating the villain’s half-baked lore. Frozen Empire seems far more interested in exposition than in ghosts. In spite of all its apparent reverence for the original movie, the visual gags, screwball comedy, and surprisingly effective scares that made the 1984 Ghostbusters great are exactly the elements Frozen Empire’s creators are unwilling to make time for.
Jokes in the new movie are relegated almost exclusively to quips and one-liners. The actors do their best to sell the punchlines, particularly series newcomer James Acaster as a droll British paranormal scientist, but no one can save bits that feel straight out of a C-tier Marvel movie like Thor: Love and Thunder or Rudd’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Meanwhile, the movie’s only jolts come when the musical themes from the original movie kick in, breaking through Frozen Empire’s otherwise bland and generically dramatic score to remind us that this series was once fun, energetic, and full of life, before it felt like just a haunted wax museum.
Image: Sony Pictures
And yet, for all the space Kenan and Reitman create by carefully, systematically removing anything remotely resembling fun from Frozen Empire, its plot and villain still don’t make much sense. There’s an ancient god who helped a warlord who eventually betrayed him, and now the god is back for revenge. Why exactly is the god still seeking vengeance so many years later? Why is he more powerful now than he used to be? Those questions go unanswered and unacknowledged. What’s even more baffling is that even though the characters talk about the villain for most of the movie, he doesn’t actually show up until 90 minutes into Frozen Empire’s grueling 115-minute run time, and he’s dispatched in the blink of an eye, with barely any Ghostbuster involvement at all.
All of this brings us back to that opening problem: The Ghostbusters franchise doesn’t really seem to be aimed at anyone anymore. It isn’t funny. It isn’t scary. It’s mostly abandoned its new younger characters, and its older actors barely seem to care. Frozen Empire’s unintentional answer to the question seems to be that Ghostbusters is now corporate nostalgia-farming given cinematic form. Sure, it’s missing all the charm and goofiness that earned the original Ghostbusters so many fans — but if you stick around long enough, they filmmakers will show off the proton packs again, and there’s always a new person to slime. It’s a franchise reduced to nothing more than a parade of hollow, familiar images, lightly repackaged in hopes that we’ll buy another ticket and try to revisit the emotions we felt when we encountered this world for the first time.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire opens in theaters on March 22.