‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’ Review – A Dull, Uninspiring Mess Of A Film

Jacob Smith   |  

Mar 22, 2024

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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the direct sequel to Ghostbusters: Afterlife — a film that three years ago infuriated film critics along with the mainstream media because it turned the 2016 feminist Ghostbusters: Answer the Call reboot into a non-canon adventure.

The Paul Feig-directed project was so bad that Ivan Reitman’s son Jason had to step in and save his father’s legacy while attempting to reinvigorate a scorned fan base. Ghostbusters: Afterlife was full of fanservice and callbacks, which was a return to form for a franchise that had been starving for a positive move forward for over three decades.

While Ghostbusters: Afterlife succeeded at leaving fans with a much better taste in their mouth than they got in 2016, the question became, where does the Ghostbusters franchise go from there? If the purpose of Ghostbusters: Afterlife was to get back into the good graces of its fan base, then what is the goal of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire?

Every time Hollywood takes one step forward they immediately find a way to take eight steps back, and there is no better example of this than the latest film from Sony Pictures. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire returns the franchise from the sticks of Oklahoma to its roots in New York City.

The Spengler family is back at the old Ghostbusters headquarters doing ghostbusting as a family… sort of. Gary (Paul Rudd) and Callie (Carrie Coon) are now a serious couple, which has drawn the ire of Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) who isn’t ready for a new stepfather in her life.

The teenager doesn’t like the fact that people are still treating her as a kid, even though she’s only 15 years old, and wants to take the ghostbusting business more seriously. As Phoebe is fighting for some respect, things in the city begin to go haywire after a supernatural force has put humanity’s existence in jeopardy.

An ancient demon that has been locked away for thousands of years is threatening to find a way out and its very existence causes people to be frozen to death. In order to stop this entity from gathering every ghost that has ever been captured in New York and waging war against the world, the newer and younger Ghostbusters must band together.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is Sony’s latest, soulless attempt to placate Ghostbusters fans by giving them Member Berries while trying to ship the franchise to a young adult direction. The film lives and breathes by nostalgia-baiting old-school fans of the franchise, hoping that some of their goodwill from the last movie carries over to this one.

All your favorite surviving Ghostbusters are back — even though they’re in their 80s — and their presence in the film gives old-school fans the legitimacy that this is still the franchise that they love from 1984. Their appearance, however, is nothing more than window dressing.

When they’re not playing up to Member Berries, the film provides the typical Hollywood humor in the sense that none of the jokes are funny, but the writers think that the audience is laughing along.

Paul Rudd is essentially playing Paul Rudd in the film. The only difference between his performance in this movie and other franchises like Ant-Man is that in this movie he doesn’t shrink and grow at will.

Mckenna Grace it’s still the focus of this movie, even though Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire does more damage to her character previously establlished in Ghostbusters: Afterlife — turning the character of Phoebe into nothing more than a rebellious teenage girl dealing with mommy issues, and possibly falling into lesbianism along the way.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire cannot find a creative middle ground between its 40-to-60-year-old core audience and the Generation Z crowd it is trying to pull in by pushing younger actors.

For a movie that went so far to ignore the all-female project from 2016, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire makes the same mistakes that made audiences hate the prior films to the point that — by the time you get to the end credits — all the goodwill that the previous installment set up will be completely wiped away.

With about a dozen new characters thrown into the mix, audiences will have a tough time liking any of them — let alone remembering their names in the process. Then again, it’s not like seeing Bill Murray or Dan Aykroyd at this stage of their careers is helping anyone either.

If you take away the nostalgia-bait and the sad attempts at making the Ghostbusters a hip and cool universe for a new audience, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a dull, uninspiring mess of a film.

If Ghostbusters: Afterlife is the best Ghostbusters film in the last eight years, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire could easily go down as the pound for pound worst Ghostbusters movie to date. And yes, that includes the movie with Kate McKinnon.

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