Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’ on VOD, an Exhumation of Past Franchise Glories

This week in What Exactly ARE The Term Limits For New York City Mayor Theatre is Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), the fifth movie in the Ghostbusters IP collection. If you thought its predecessor, 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife was a nostalgiafest, well, you kinda ain’t seen nothin’ yet, because the new film returns the ’busters to New York, where the mayor is STILL the man who Peter Venkman accused of lacking a certain reproductive organ. That’s 40 years, people. Quite the career in public service! Anyway, the new movie brings back the Afterlife characters and smooshes them together with the OG characters (again), but there are more of both of them this time; notably, Gil Kenan takes over the director’s chair from Jason Reitman, although you might be hard-pressed to notice, and one may be mayor of New York for three four-year terms and then run again after taking a four-year break, I just looked it up, so, so much for that joke. But at least I was prompted to learn something new by this movie, which otherwise struggles to justify its existence.

GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: NEW YORK CITY, 1904: The fire brigade barrels out of a very familiar building. They race to a boardroom where a bunch of hoity-toities must’ve messed with some Power Beyond Their Understanding, because they’re all dead, frozen solid where they stand. Weird! I sure hope a character played by Patton Oswalt shows up later in the movie to explain all this! CUT TO: New York in the present day, where Ecto-1 barrels down the street. A ghost is loose – the Hell’s Kitchen Sewer Dragon, in case you’re wondering – and needs to be busted. Key characters from Afterlife are in the car: Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) drives whilst wisecracking, his girlfriend Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon) wisecracks from the passenger seat and her teenage kids, 18-year-old Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and 15-year-old Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) wisecrack from the back. They manage to use their fun new gear (a ghost-trap drone, a nifty gunner seat) to snag the creature with only moderate property damage, but it still enrages Mayor Peck (William Atherton), who still has an ax to grind with the Ghostbusters and makes declarations about shutting them down and says he’s not keen on how Phoebe’s wielding of an electricity laser blaster is essentially child labor. They all respond how we expect them to: with wisecracks, of course.

These four Ghostbusters are a makeshift family living in Ghostbusters HQ, where they firepole down from the bedroom to the kitchen for dinner. Gary engages in a very boring and half-assed subplot in which he isn’t sure where he stands with the kids-who-aren’t-his-kids. Less boring but almost as half-assed is the main plot, which kicks off when Gary ventures down to the containment unit to deposit the latest captured ghost, and the machine makes a downright heckish noise. Office manager Janine (Annie Potts) – you know, as in, “Hello, Ghostbustahs, whaddaya want?” – says the unit’s never been emptied. So they consult Ghostbuster-turned-businessman Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), who has a secret lab where Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) and Lars (James Acaster) use doohickeys and whatchamajiggits to extract ghosts from haunted objects and contain them. From haunted objects the likes of which Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) collects and YouTubes about, with the help of his young assistant Podcast (Logan Kim), who, note to the screenwriters, could really use a name that isn’t as annoying and flippant as Podcast. May I suggest Bob? Bob is a good name.

The focus here – such as it is, considering the sprawl – is on Phoebe, who’s P.O.’ed because her mom and Gary, concerned by the mayor’s threats, won’t let her go on ghostbusting runs anymore. Phoebe mopes and frowns and befriends a stray ghost, Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), who died in a fire, and therefore easily trumps Phoebe in the angst department. Meanwhile, you can’t have a Ghostbusters nostalgiafest without snack-scarfing blobbo-ghost Slimer, who harasses Trevor in the attic. Also meanwhile, and more prevalent to the main story, a goofball named Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani), who’s clearly the stand-in Rick Moranis character since Moranis likely couldn’t be coaxed from retirement, brings a very powerful thingy to Ray, a thingy so powerful it houses a demon who once turned a boardroom full of hoity-toities into ice sculptures, something we learn when a character played by Patton Oswalt explains it to us. Thank god for a character played by Patton Oswalt, or we’d have no idea what’s going on here! He’s also one of several characters too many in this movie, something that hurts me to say since Oswalt is always funny, although the movie kinda makes him less funny than usual. Oh, and same goes for Bill Murray, who drops in for a couple scenes to deliver flimsy lines like “We’re gonna need a bigger trap,” a non-zinger that’s absolutely unworthy of an all-timer like Peter Venkman. So it goes, I guess.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Frozen Empire reaaallllllyyyyyyy wants to conjure the magic of the original movie (and its highly unmemorable sequel), so it takes a somewhat reasonable facsimile of that template and blends it with the modern aesthetic of Afterlife, and comes up with a bland, digestible paste. Think how you were meh about the more recent Terminator movies, and you’re in the same ballpark.

Performance Worth Watching: Akyroyd, a real-life UFOs-and-ghosts believer, grins and winks his way through this, and seems to have found a way to enjoy himself in this reanimated role. He’s an old pro who can pull off a fun performance despite the lack of inspiration in the writing and directing departments.

Memorable Dialogue: This line might’ve been lame if Nanjiani wasn’t delivering it: “I’m a potential deep well of psychokinetic energy and am probably possessed. Can I try the fire pole?”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: So the villain here is an incredibly boring CGI monster named Garaka or Bianca or extra-strength Tinactin or something. He wants to take over the world, I think – his motive is never clear, so we’ll just fall back on what evil entities in movies always want to do – and he can control all the other ghosts and make them his army. He has the power to turn the surrounding environment into a frozen hellscape, but instead of just killing all 16 dozen of the main characters with a gesture, he surrounds them with giant ice spikes and then proceeds to monologue until one of the heroes figures out how to stop him. You’d think he could just murder them and enslave their ghosts and get on with the conquering of the world and all that, but that would be too easy and not convoluted enough for this movie, which is splattery chaos in need of an editor, and more specifically, an editor who has no attachment to their nostalgic feelings from the 1980s and can therefore whittle all this down to a story that doesn’t feel so shallow and calculated. 

Frozen Empire is dedicated to the late Ivan Reitman, who was a key player in making the first Ghostbusters a comedy classic; I bet his ghost shrugged at this one, which has all the stuff it needs to be funny, but tries too hard to be funny, and therefore isn’t particularly funny. I chuckled a couple times, smirked a few others, but mostly just tolerated the whirling maelstrom of shiny, highly professional nonsense Kenan oversees. The director doesn’t get the balance right between effort, writing and cast chemistry, and we’re left with a grab-bag of so-so visual gags, extended cameos, middling one-liners and all the easter eggs you can swallow, because a chunk of modern IP without easter eggs might as well not even exist. 

Considering the talent on hand (Coon, whose charisma juiced projects ranging from Gone Girl to the best season of Fargo, feels especially underused) and the eternal goodwill of the original film, it’s hard not to deem Afterlife another missed opportunity for the franchise. Glazer doesn’t necessarily blow it, maintaining a propulsive pace, executing perfectly fine action sequences and getting the knobs-and-switches-and-clutter visual aesthetic right. But in accomplishing the feat of keeping us just barely modestly entertained for two hours, the movie feels like one of those games where your team ekes out a low-scoring victory by making one less unforced error than the other team. Color me underwhelmed.

Our Call: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a definite wait-til-Netflix-er, so SKIP IT until you can see it with minimal investment or obligation.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.