The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-
I was seemingly one of very few people that hated Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but the trailers made me hopeful for this latest entry. While Afterlife was manipulative nostalgia porn that was completely beholden to the original Ghostbusters, Frozen Empire looked to finally be escaping from that film’s shadow and seemed inspired by the 1980s animated series with its ghost-of-the-week format. Well, I was wrong. Whoever cut that trailer together deserves a raise because Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a complete mess.
The trailer makes it seem like the plot of Frozen Empire revolves around an ice demon that freezes New York City and the Ghostbusters are called in to save the day. That’s a plot straight out of the animated series and exactly the kind of episodic format that this franchise should be adopting. Unfortunately, the movie presented in the trailer is only about the last fifteen minutes of Frozen Empire. The film starts promisingly enough with a prologue set in 1904 that introduces the new villain (Garraka) and then cuts to present day when the Ghostbusters are chasing down a ghost dragon through the streets of New York in Ecto-1. Garraka seems like a solid villain and the modern-day chase scene is an exciting introduction to the new team in the old team’s stomping grounds of NYC.
But you had better enjoy those opening scenes because 1. This is only appearance of the villain until the last 15 minutes of the movie and 2. This is the last time you will see the Ghostbusters actually busting ghosts for the remainder of the film. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is such a disjointed mess that it legitimately depresses me that somebody was paid a lot of money to write a script this awful. In between the opening and closing fifteen minutes, the movie amounts to little more than loosely connected subplots and vignettes that rarely go anywhere and never go anywhere sensical. Phoebe has a lesbian subplot (so that the franchise can finally check that box) when she falls in love with a ghost girl in the park. This subplot involves these two characters having really boring conversations and playing chess prior to a plot twist that would require both Phoebe and the ghost to be complete fucking morons. We have Trevor discovering Slimer in the firehouse and trying to capture him. This goes nowhere and is basically recreating a subplot that was cut from Ghostbusters 2 because it didn’t serve a purpose in 1989 either. William Atherton returns as Walter Peck, the EPA agent from the first movie that has now risen to mayor. This goes nowhere and he doesn’t even have any banter with Peter, so there really is no reason for this character to exist, let alone for it to be Walter Peck.
That’s not all. We also have a subplot about a lineage of people with pyrokinetic abilities charged with guarding against the return of Garraka. We have both Phoebe and Trevor struggling with coming of age. We have Gary (Paul Rudd) adjusting to his new role as a father figure. We have the new tech division of Ghostbusters that develops their devices and introduces yet even more characters. Good fucking god, do you remember when this franchise was just about four dudes busting ghosts? You know, back when it wasn’t about family drama and didn’t include more characters than a historical epic? This movie is so stuffed with extraneous bullshit that the central plot literally has almost no screen time.
Frozen Empire has more characters than War and Peace, though Phoebe emerges as the closest thing that we have to a main character. This is unfortunate because she has turned into a sad sack that mopes through the movie and only perks up to make terrible choices that make me question that she is supposed to be the genius descendant of Egon. Trevor has little screentime other than the pointless Slimer subplot. Paul Rudd is just there to make occasional, cringe-inducing references to the original movies. The mother character/Paul Rudd’s girlfriend is back and, I don’t know, she maybe had a couple of lines that I can’t remember. Podcast is back. Remember that nothing of a character from Afterlife? He serves no purpose in this movie. The other teen girl from Afterlife is also back and I’m not going to pretend that I know her name by looking it up, but she’s working with a scientist in the tech division. I don’t remember his name either. Neither of them serve a purpose in this movie. There is the pyrokinetic character that could have easily been written out because he only detracts from the Ghostbusters. Patton Oswalt shows up as a librarian to give the expository background on the villain, even though Ray is supposed to be an expert on the occult and easily could have served this purpose without the addition of a new character. This all feels like the first draft of a script that needed a lot of notes. Like, a lot of notes.
Then there are the classic Ghostbusters, all of whom are either also completely unnecessary to the plot or now feel like completely different characters. Fortunately, the film doesn’t again almost literally drag out the corpse of Harold Ramis after turning Egon into a deadbeat asshole in Afterlife. Unfortunately, the others don’t fare much better. Ray is now a buffoon whose role is to look in wide-eyed wonder at everything as if he hasn’t been doing this for 40 fucking years. The intelligence and moral compass of the character are now gone; he’s just an adult-sized child. Winston is my favorite character in the original Ghostbusters because of his blue collar, no-nonsense reactions to the ridiculous shit going on around him. Now he’s a sophisticated millionaire, which I’m guessing the writers thought was a triumphant arc for the character except that its an arc that took place off-screen over the last 40 years and, therefore, he just doesn’t seem like the same character. Bill Murray shows up just long enough to get a moneyshot of him in his Ghostbusters suit so that he can get another paycheck. Annie Potts briefly shows up just so she can finally put a Ghostbuster suit on. Why does she even have a suit there? As much as the original cast was just a nostalgia ploy in Afterlife, at least they did something at the end of the movie. Here, they don’t do shit. They accomplish nothing. They are just there for promotional shots to sell the movie to people my age. It angers me, quite frankly.
Aside from the largely unnecessary inclusion of the original cast, the nostalgia bait is turned down a bit from Afterlife. At least we don’t get Gozer again and there are some nice, subtle cameos of items from the first two movies that I appreciated. What I didn’t appreciate is the nonsensical inclusion of the miniature marshmallow men, who are again here only as a reminder of the original movie even if it makes zero sense for them to be there. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was conjured in the original when Ray unwittingly chose him as the form of the destroyer. So why are the miniature ones (still) here? We get a return to the New York Public Library where the team is greeted by the same employee that greeted them in 1984 and I really hope that dude is nearing retirement because I’m starting to worry about his financial situation. The library ghost is still there too, so I guess she has just been there for 40 years? Its true that we never saw the Ghostbusters circle back to her, but the library has done nothing about this for decades? The appearance of Slimer in the firehouse makes the most sense, but his appearance goes nowhere.
The one positive that I’ll say is that the effects and ghost designs are very good. I always dread seeing CGI versions of old effect, but Slimer looks good here and the new creature designs (the ghost dragon and Garraka) are quite cool. I just wish we got to see more of them instead of spending time with a hundred unnecessary human characters.
I probably covered this when I reviewed Afterlife, but the original Ghostbusters was the first movie that I ever watched as a kid and I probably watched it a hundred times. I still know every word of it by heart. The cartoon was my favorite TV show as a kid. I had all of the toys and comic books. I had the bed sheets. Ghostbusters 2 was the second movie I ever saw in a theater, following only Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I have an autographed picture of Dan Aykroyd from the first movie and an animation cell from the cartoon hanging on my wall. You might say I’m a fan. But this just isn’t working as a film series and, unfortunately, Ghostbusters probably should have ended with the passing of Harold Ramis. And now I’m sad.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters%3A_Frozen_Empire#/media/File:Ghostbusters_(2024)_poster.jpg
