Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

After Ghostbusters: Afterlife turned out to be halfway decent, as well as box office hit, it was inevitable that another sequel would show up at some point.  To be honest that wasn't something that I waited for with any sort of anticipation.  While Afterlife was good it took the plot of Ghostbusters, placed it in rural Oklahoma, added some family drama and heaped on the nostalgia with Egon Spengler's ghost showing up to help fight the big bad guy at the end.  

I have always been behind Bill Murray when it came to making sequels to the original.  Ghostbusters II was okay, but nowhere near as fun as the original.  He refused to cooperate despite scripts being written over the years, and the 2016 reboot pretty much justified his attitude.  In time he softened, and I understand why, but my fear was that Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire was going to repeat the problems of Ghostbusters II, bringing the cast back once again but not doing anything new with the material.  I was half right on that, but at least this time director Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman tried to get beyond Gozer and his minions. 

Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon), her boyfriend Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) and her kids Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) have moved from Oklahoma to the Big Apple to take up ghost busting full time.  Winston (Ernie Hudson) has purchased the fire house the original crew worked out of, giving the family both a place to live and a base of operations.  Problem is, Walter Peck (William Atherton) is now mayor of New York and is looking to end what he sees as the Ghostbusters' reign of terror.

Winston has not only kept the Ghostbusters in business, but has also set up a secret lab to expand the storage space for paranormal beings - something that is getting short at the firehouse - and study them as well.  Many of the recent arrivals are from possessed objects that Ray (Dan Aykroyd) obtains through a YouTube show.  One of those is a brass sphere that turns out to contain a banished god, and the attempts by one of Winston's researchers, Lars (James Acaster), to open it results in some concerning phenomena.  Meanwhile Phoebe, left out of recent activities due to her age, befriends a ghost named Melody (Emily Alyn Lind) who may have ulterior motives.

I do commend Reitman and Kenan with not going over well-worn territory with this sequel.  However, it is still chock full of fan service, this time for fans of the animated shows as well as the movies.  I do like that everything from the old toy commercials to the video for "Ghostbusters" is incorporated as part of the universe, but this goes as far to bring back the librarian from the first movie for the same exact scare.  Slimer is back, as are the Sta-Puff marshmallow men from the last film, providing some humor throughout.  It just seems like too much of the movie, as it tries to move away and be its own thing, is tied down with references to the original. 

Bill Murray does return as Venkman, with Annie Potts returning as Janine.  Patton Oswalt has a cameo as Dr. Hubert Wartzki, a language professor at the Metropolitan Library, while Kumail Nanjiani plays a ne'er-do-well named Nadeem whose grandmother was the guardian of the sphere.  Nadeem is integral, Wartzki is great and it's nice to see Janine back, but Venkman is given little to do beyond a glorified cameo for Murray.  Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson are much more essential and, as key as Murray was to the originals, there wasn't much reason for him to be here this time.  

Therein lies a major problem.  We have Lars, who is kind of like Egon, as well as Lucky (Celeste O'Connor) officially being one of the Ghostbusters from Winston's lab.  There are the surviving original crew plus Janine getting suited up, as does everyone in the extended Spengler family.  Add in Nadeem doing his thing and it almost feels like they might as well just start recruiting most of Manhattan in the busting business.  It doesn't help that the new big bad guy, Garraka, is as dull as any Marvel villain.  There is a wonderful animated backstory narrated by Wartzki that tells what happened to Garraka thousands of years prior, but when he finally arrives to freeze New York he is just another badly animated CGI blob.  It's disappointing, considering how they did a great job bringing a possessed statue to life earlier. 

On the good side are the new lab and, though parts of the movie are still lighthearted, the recent Ghostbusters films feel like they are being taken seriously rather than just a set-up for jokes.  The problem with Ghostbusters II was that, while the first one had a lot of improvising and playing off the actors, the sequel felt forced.  The humor in the all-female one just wasn't that funny.  For Afterlife and Frozen Empire the humor comes naturally, while the supernatural parts take the precedence they should.  I just wish they knew what to do with Phoebe other than have her mope. 

I can understand why this wasn't liked as much as Afterlife.  I find it decent, but it does lack some of the emotion of the previous film.  This time around the emphasis is more on the busting aspect than the family drama and catching up on what happened to everyone over the years.  What it needed was fewer characters, more time with Trevor and Slimer, less of a predictable plot between Phoebe and Melody and, though it wasn't Gozer this time, getting beyond the big bad guy being an invincible god.  

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

Time: 115 minutes

Starring: Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Dan Aykroyd, Kumail Nanjiani, Ernie Hudson

Director: Gil Kenan