Too Many Ghostbusters

Don’t expect flaming hot sensations from Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the believe-it-or-not fifth installment in the sputtering series that launched forty years ago. This latest version, chock full of paranormal lore, old-timer sentiment, modern-family dysfunction, and self-referential tickle-me high-fives, groans under its own cheerful weight.

GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Jason Reitman
Written by: Gil Kenan, Jason Reitman
Starring: Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Kumail Nanjiani, Patton Oswalt, Celeste O’Connor, Logan Kim, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts
Running time: 115 mins

Too many characters grappling with too much exposition certainly expands the IP world-building opportunities, as do all the newfangled gadgets and fan-favorite callbacks. A ghost trap drone! Ghost enclosures with plasma fields! A new Ghostbusters headquarters ensconced in a decommissioned aquarium! An ethnically diverse crop of teenage Ghostbusters! The completely gratuitous gremlinesque gaggle of miniature Stay-Puft Marshmallow Men who keep popping up for no good reason! Superfluous Slimer sightings! All the bells and whistles are very diverting—but a compelling thrill ride this film is not.

Part of the original gag hatched by frat-boy laffmeisters Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis was that their big comedy-horror-action-spectacle had its own branded logo, jumpsuit uniform, sci-fi gear and earworm theme song. The fact that these underdog goofballs were the ones saving the world was the joke. That the whole enterprise was so unlikely—weirdly delightful and knuckleheaded and wink-wink ridiculous—is what made it so endearing.

Not so for Frozen Empire, a direct sequel to the 2021 reboot Ghostbusters: Afterlife, mainly because its writer-producer Jason Reitman, son of the first film’s director Ivan Reitman and the current creative force, is now going for big-hearted, family-friendly supernatural cornpone, where characters say things like “So cool!” and “We’re too old for this!” There’s even an elevated touch of the highbrow—who kicks off a Ghostbusters movie with a Robert Frost poem, honestly?

Reitman’s franchise pivot squelches the silly and amps up the angst. The legacy left behind by dear-departed Egon Spengler (the late Harold Ramis, digitally conjured for the last movie) is the reason his daughter Callie (Carrie Coon) and grandkids Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) transplanted from rural Oklahoma to the famous firehouse in lower Manhattan. The Spengler clan, along with mom’s genial boyfriend Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), spend their days propping up that dilapidated building when they’re not zooming around town in their 10-ton modified hearse lassoing on-the-loose specters. But all that ghostbusting makes 15-year-old Phoebe technically a minor in peril, so her family sidelines her out of begrudging respect for the law and a belated acquiescence to good parenting.

But she’s the one who strikes up a friendship with a mysterious pouty transapparating teen ghost named Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), who may or may not hold the key to a secretly looming phantom god known as Garaka. The evil deity, who uses fear as a weapon with his death chill—which literally freezes everything in its vicinity—wants to raise an army of spirits to wage war against humanity. The key to his plans: cracking open the containment unit where the Ghostbusters have been dumping their prey for decades. All Garaka has to do is somehow manipulate someone to speak the pre-Sumerian chant that will break him out of a magical brass orb covered in meso-Arabic glyphs where he’s been trapped for thousands of years. Told you this flick’s got too much exposition.

Fold in a folklorist at the New York Public Library (Patton Oswalt), a deadbeat man-child (Kumail Nanjiani) who’s actually the direct descendant of ancient pyrokinetics called the Fire Masters, former “dickless wonder” city wonk and now NYC mayor Walter Peck (William Atherton), next-gen Ghostbusters Lucky Domingo (Celeste O’Connor) and Lars Pinfield (James Acaster), and Poebe’s Oakie bestie Podcast (Logan Kim). Plus add some extended cameos from o.g. ghostbusting docs Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), and perma-assistant now strapping on the portable proton accelerator Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts). Told you this flick’s got too many characters.

Like an overstuffed Marvel movie, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a lockstep orchestration of overlapping protagonists with intersecting plotlines that all gravitate towards a confrontation with an existential threat. The result is both busy and banal, an overthought calculation leaving very little room for the shaggy charm that made the first movie such a hit. The surrounding background detritus of discarded tech—CRT monitors, IBM desktops with glowing green-and-black screens, closed-circuit wires powering vacuum tubes in chunky machinery—hint at the inherent messiness that made this material so wonderful back in the day. Irreverence is in its soul. Let’s hope the next movie isn’t just another ghost in the machine.