Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (Kenan, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

Even by the standards of the modern-day blockbuster landscape, the Ghostbusters franchise has had a very strange trajectory since its first instalment in 1984. The first film, a ramshackle, SNL-adjacent vehicle, was a decidedly unserious slacker comedy as raunchy as it was undemanding – pure Hollywood pablum. That film’s ineffable, tossed-off quality hardly seemed to suggest it was a worthy title for obsessive fanboyism; and yet, after a far-less-loved sequel, a culture war-sparking reboot and a hyper-commercialised retread with the son of the original’s director in the hot seat, we find ourselves at Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a film of many masters and a dizzying number of boxes to be ticked. In case it isn’t clear, I’ve never bought into the Ghostbusters hype. The first is a product of an eighties blockbuster system discovering new ways to infantilise its audience and expand profitability, a film that coasts off the charm of Bill Murray’s central performance but offers incredibly little substance, even as a minor-key comedy. I’ve never understood what has engendered the particular, heated affection that the series inspires in some, building to a Star Wars-esque fervour whenever the sacred text of the original is threatened – as in the mostly harmless all-female reboot of 2016. My best guess is that it, like other eighties films like Back to the Future, The Goonies and Top Gun, Ghostbusters is so firmly entrenched in the psyches of a generation of hardline nostalgics that any gesture toward criticism of the sacred cows was treasonous. Who, though, could have wanted or preferred what we got next? Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a product so drained of character or energy, coasting on weak callbacks and sub-sub-sub-Spielbergian storytelling, stank of corporate cynicism, a hallmark of an era entirely out of ideas.

That terrible film is the predecessor to Frozen Empire, which is the vastly superior effort simply due to its (somewhat) loosened shackles, freer to simply breeze by rather than bend over backwards constantly trying to make a case for itself, even as it overloads and overstuffs its plot until it’s fit to burst. Afterlife, as directed by Jason Reitman (son of Ivan), desperately tried to course-correct after the earlier all-female reboot – presenting the logo, the car, the proton blasters, etcetera, with the kind of reverence one would expect to be reserved for ancient Egyptian artefacts – in the hopes that angry male nerds would feel assuaged. The new, Gil Kenan-directed effort is able to stretch its legs a bit, even as it strays ever further from the lowly intentions of the original. Kenan, the director of spooky children’s horror classic Monster House and the undervalued City of Ember, is a far better fit for the material than Reitman, who inherited little of his father’s irreverence. Kenan embraces the new vision for Ghostbusters as a resolutely family-friendly series, echoing Spielberg (or, more accurately, Spielberg scion Joe Dante) to lesser results, but ones that go down far easier than Afterlife’s soulless panhandling. 

Following on from the especially dire franchise reboot Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the latest foray for the iconic series is this unnecessary if generally watchable sequel, which manages to be a marginal improvement on its predecessor while still not making much of a case for itself. Director Gil Kenan pushes the franchise even further into harmless family-fare territory, an odd concession to commercial pressures that never quite gels.

In Frozen Empire, the descendents of deceased Ghostbuster Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis, blessedly not resurrected through ghoulish digital technology as in Afterlife) have moved into the fabled Ghostbusters firehouse in New York City to work as fulltime Ghostbusters. Mother Callie (Carrie Coon, one of our finest actresses, utterly wasted), stepdad-cum-science teacher Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd, injecting a modicum of charm), and teenagers Trevor and Phoebe Spengler (Finn Wolfhard and McKenna Grace) are all living a life of supernatural-stalking bliss, with only the occasional threat from a local government goon trying to shut them down to bring down the mood. When a mysterious orb (it’s always a mysterious orb, isn’t it?) finds its way to the desk of retired Ghostbuster Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) care of deadbeat Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani) selling off his family’s ancient heirlooms, a demigod is unexpectedly unleashed, one that aims to raise an army of the undead by releasing the ghosts held in captivity at the Ghostbusters firehouse. That’s a lot of plot – and that doesn’t even begin to cover the several subplots that unspool in tandem, attempting and failing to dovetail by the film’s messy climax. Young Phoebe, a moody and lonely fifteen-year-old, befriends the ghost of a teenager (Emily Alyn Lind) who died horribly in a fire, finding her first true connection and perhaps the sparks of romantic longing. Now eighteen, older brother Trevor is attempting to assert his adulthood, while Gary continues to try and find a way to connect with his new stepkids. That’s not to mention that Nadeem is also part of an ancient race of firebenders who are destined to protect the world from the aforementioned demigod, who wields the power of ice, apparently. Meanwhile(!) the Ghostbusters organisation is expanding under the watchful eye of one-time Ghostbuster, now billionaire Winston (Ernie Hudson), who has recruited new scientist Lars (James Acaster) and Trevor’s friend Lucky (Celeste O’Connor). Oh, and Phoebe’s only living friend, the endlessly aggravating Podcast (Logan Kim) is there too, for some reason.

It’s a frankly dizzying amount of detail to sift through in under two hours, with an overabundance of characters who frankly don’t need to be there. Phoebe and Trevor’s buddies from Afterlife are an afterthought here, as are most of the older generation of Ghostbusters. Hilariously, Bill Murray shows up for two scenes, about as egregious a phone-in performance as I can remember (one imagines, from the haphazard way that he is edited into the climax, that he was on set for about six hours). The profound question that arises is ‘why?’. What is there to gain from all these needless subplots, which spin their wheels all the way up to a climax that feels both rushed and entirely too late. It also does a disservice to what does work here – Grace’s performance, the closest that Frozen Empire has to a lead, is pretty great, and her fledgling relationship with the mysterious spirit that has crossed her path is largely effective, if a little over-telegraphed. Rudd, meanwhile, is always enjoyable and provides enough comic relief in the early stretches that I was briefly convinced that Frozen Empire might just pull the damn thing off. 

Something that’s intriguing but predictably unexplored by Frozen Empire is how the development of the in-world Ghostbusters organisation serves a strange reflection of the actual franchise itself. Where once the films made explicit the fact that Ghostbusting was a ragtag, blue collar business, now it’s an institution of immense scale and endless budget due to Winston’s funding. The original, humble beginnings of the business have been dwarfed by the concerns of a giant corporation. That’s why, even when Frozen Empire manages to be servicably innoffensive, even occasionally watchable, there’s this persistent, nagging knowledge that this is a franchise whose eventful history has ultimately led them to a most ignominous point – being just another line in a shareholder’s spreadsheet. It is a nostalgic property dead-set on cashing in that nostalgia, but one that has all but left the spectre of what made the original so beloved in the rearview. One imagines that those releasing the film hope you’ll have already bought a ticket and be sitting in the theatre by the time you begin to wonder: ‘who is this for?’

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is in cinemas now.

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