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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is Dead Cold


“I never want to see another Ghostbusters movie” was the final note of my review of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, by a not inconsiderable margin the worst movie of the Ghostbusters franchise. The success of that movie though wouldn’t let me get away with that. The series putters on and as a critic I feel a responsibility to continue to assess it and what it says/means for contemporary popular culture. So here I am again, commenting on a new entry in a forty year old series birthed out of a goofy comedy premise.
Ghostbusters has evolved in drastic ways over the years, from a silly, heavily Reaganite take on supernatural pest control to a reverent legacy property with drawn-out lore that takes itself very seriously more often than not. Directed by Gil Kenan, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is probably the furthest into this new identity the series has yet leaned, largely unconcerned with being consistently funny while diving deep into establishing and emphasizing a consequential mythology. It’s a bizarre shift in priority that was by no means intended by the creators of the original movie (who’d made it clearly for adults, only for children to adopt it as a cultural staple), but by now the tone of that comedy classic is as foreign to the franchise as any other 80s comedy -and it would be pointless to re-litigate that. Still, even as this new beast, there’s a lot to be desired.
Tossing out the Oklahoma setting of the last movie, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire drops its cast through inexplicable rationale back in New York, contriving a way to situate them at the old Firehouse from which they regularly engage in Ghostbusting activity. Consistently in consultation with their elder counterparts, Callie (Carrie Coon), Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and Phoebe Spengler (Mckenna Grace) and former teacher Gary (Paul Rudd), are now called upon to defeat another ancient god and the ghosts under its influence as it threatens to put all of New York under a deep freeze.
That really seems to be the only plotline these movies can think of, though Frozen Empire to its credit doesn't just replay the hits like its predecessor did -trying to add in new dimensions and features to the Ghostbusters world. World-building is in fact one of its chief priorities. Not only does the movie bring together two casts, establish an elaborate multi-faceted enterprise of Ghostbusting, and canonizes the prevalence of the Ghostbusters-themed pop culture and merchandising phenomenon, but it reveals a sustained history of ghost-catching endeavours going back to mythic Fire Masters of ancient India. It is the apex of this series' self-importance and not particularly compelling beyond the nostalgia some of the imagery evokes.
Out of this expansion and key focus on lore is a movie that feels inordinately busy and most of the time not very fun. Ghostbusters isn't particularly good when it tries to play Indiana Jones, with complex history, mystic macguffins, and big earth-shattering stakes. And filling out its margins with reference points and phony attempts to justify nostalgia-baiting doesn't make a difference -in fact it makes the movie look more shallow.  In addition to the old team (Annie Potts's Janine included -now in her own uniform) this movie brings back William Atherton as the first movie's villain Peck -now New York mayor and once again engaged in a subplot of trying to shut down the Ghostbusters. Slimer is back again for no reason but to continue as brand mascot and occupy time for Wolfhard's minuscule corner of the movie (his character is barely present outside of the opening and closing set-pieces). And while Dan Aykroyd's Ray and Ernie Hudson's Winston have expansive roles, Bill Murray's Peter remains a glorified cameo.
The one area where the film divorces itself from both its own legacy and its dull pretensions is the major storyline pertaining to the de facto protagonist of this latest iteration of Ghostbusters. Mckenna Grace is much improved as the brainy and stoic Phoebe, playing her with a little more teenage emotionality and vulnerability; and here, isolated by her age and competence, she forms a curious friendship of sorts with a similarly disenchanted ghost girl played by Emily Alyn Lind. Unfortunately and in spite of the conceptual interest clearly put into it, this too fails to materialize into anything substantive as it quickly falls into mundane formula -played out and resolved in the most trite of ways.
The wasted potential here is the most disappointing, and that's true of the other little elements of the film that do point towards something better. There's the hint of a conflict between Winston's now hands-off approach to Ghostbusting and Ray's childlike insistence to continue being part of the action (a good if perhaps unconscious metaphor for how much more attached Aykroyd has been to the series over the decades than his co-stars), but nothing is made of it. Winston's lab with the ghosts that inhabit its containments is a good setting; and thank god for James Acaster as his chief employee Lars -a rare bright spot of the movie overall. Even as he exists mostly to deliver exposition, his sardonic wit and deadpan attitude about this weird job makes him come across as a much better Ghostbuster than anyone else in the movie, including those original Ghostbusters.
Someone else who works surprisingly well, at least in terms of capturing the series' humourous spirit, is Kumail Nanjiani as the Fire Master descendant key to defeating the villain. He serves in something of a Rick Moranis capacity here, but he's got a few really solid character moments and epitomizes well that offbeat humour with regards to the supernatural that the 1984 classic was built on. As mentioned, that isn’t much found in this movie -where it does comedy it’s of a very manufactured kind, bereft of that engaging spontaneity and precise delivery. Rudd, though he could certainly fit that style, is pointless here -making bland jokes like where he gravely recites the lyrics to the Ghostbusters song. And indeed as merely the boyfriend of the Spengler matriarch his presence in New York with her family (to whom a recurring joke is his lack of relation) is entirely arbitrary.
There are a couple neat sequences to Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, from the Manhattan deep freeze to the climactic confrontation, which does at least give off a slightly different atmosphere from the endgame sequences of every movie up to this point. It’s a movie that fulfils all of the bare obligations in terms of beats and fan service, and even if a lot of it is quite hollow it is at least a marginal improvement on its predecessor (possibly better than Ghostbusters II as well). But it still can’t quite amount to being good, neither concerned with doing anything truly inspired nor severing ties with a legacy it just pays shallow lip-service to. And it’s going to do the exact same thing with whatever cash-grab follow-up or reboot comes after this. A franchise that will seemingly forever be in the shadow of that one miracle of an 80s comedy, frozen in time. 

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