Shapeless as a ghost — but at least Bill’s a hoot
The original was a classic, but this reboot is...
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12A, 115 mins) Verdict: Slightly lukewarm ★★★☆☆
The Persian Version (15A, 107 mins) Verdict: Worth immersion ★★★☆☆
ALMOST 40 years have passed since the original Ghostbusters arrived in Ireland, which for those of us who vividly remember seeing it back in December 1984 is slightly disconcerting. To make matters worse, I rewatched it recently and it might just have aged better than we have.
It was a highly influential film, too. It got Hollywood excited by the comedic potential of special effects, while society at large, albeit mainly in America, started appending the suffix ‘busters’ to everything. ‘Price-busters’ and ‘budget-busters’ became everyday expressions. And at the box office, of course, Ivan Reitman’s movie went gangbusters.
Reitman died two years ago but had a producer credit on the 2021 revival, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which was directed by his son Jason and was huge fun.
Now Gil Kenan, who co-wrote Afterlife, takes the directorial reins on a sequel, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
It’s less appealing than the 2021 film, with a meandering plot that doesn’t really coalesce until the last half-hour. Like many of the best ghosts, it’s somewhat shapeless. But the likeable principals are the same as last time, led by the splendid young Mckenna Grace, whose spirited character, 15-year-old Phoebe Spengler, looks and behaves as if advised to keep a female Harry Potter in mind.
PHOEBE now lives in the Manhattan firehouse made famous by the original film, with her older brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), mother Callie (Carrie Coon) and her mum’s partner, formerly her own science teacher, Mr Grooberson (Paul Rudd).
They spend their days patrolling the streets in a venerable Mercedes Sprinter, kitted out to help them zap the city’s more dangerous spectres.
But of course they’re not alone in this noble mission. Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson reprise their characters from the 1984 film, while British stand-up comedian James Acaster joins the cast as a paranormal researcher. He works out of a laboratory housed in an old aquarium, where technicians extract ghosts from everyday objects but don’t entirely succeed in extracting much discernible acting talent from Acaster. He’s what you might call engagingly wooden, although I expect that American audiences will be more than satisfied by his faint resemblance to the young Michael Caine.
Meanwhile, very randomly playing solo chess in Washington Square Park one night, Phoebe meets a ghost of about her age, Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), who died ‘in a terrifying tenement fire’. The pair bond with distinct hints, as in the last film, that Phoebe might be gay.
We can doubtless expect an LGBTQ Ghostbusters next time out. But in the meantime, is Melody the supportive spirit she appears to be? Let’s say that she has conflicting motivations, which end up in what you might call a wraith to the line with the real villain of the piece, an evil 4,000year-old warrior who wants, naturally, to destroy humanity. This he aims to do with his all-too-literally chilling ability to freeze anything he touches. And as all this silliness unfolds there are some enjoyable setpieces and crackerjack one-liners, especially once Murray enters the fray, but at no point was I as enchanted as I was watching the last film, or indeed the first one.
■ THE PERSIAN VERSION, too, is about conflict, but only within a family.
In Maryam Keshavarz’s partly autobiographical film, Leila (Layla Mohammadi) is a bisexual screenwriter who was brought up in New Jersey after her parents and eight brothers left postrevolutionary Iran.
Leila spent her schooldays feeling too Iranian to assimilate in America, and too American to fit in on visits back to Iran.
But as an adult her identity crisis is more to do with her sexuality, and the confrontations it ignites with her stern mother, Shireen (Niousha Noor).
If that makes it sound a bit too solemn and intense, let me reassure you. On the whole, The Persian Version is a comedy, and a notably lively one, full of selfaware quirks in which Leila breaks the so-called ‘fourth wall’ and speaks direct to camera, or characters become immobile as the action develops around them.
Ambitiously, Keshavarz also attempts to tell Shireen’s story, whisking us back to her traumatic life as a very young mother in the time of the Shah. This requires a switch in tone that feels more like a lurch; the director doesn’t quite carry it off. But throughout there is enough that is both funny and thought-provoking to make the film worth seeing.