Who you gonna call for a funny film? Not them
Five times isn’t the charm for franchise
Complaining about formula in a “Ghostbusters” movie feels a bit like moaning about finding cob- webs in a haunted house. You know what to expect going in.
The 40-year-old comedy fran- chise started by late Canadian mirth master Ivan Reitman is built around familiar elements that fans expect and want, everything from the bickering title phantom hunters to gobbling green ghost Slimer and Ray Parker Jr.’s fist-waving theme song. And that’s OK, for the most part.
Where formula fails is when it overwhelms the story, something that’s all too evident in “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” the fifth and hopefully final film in the series. It’s all too much of nothing special and all too little of anything funny or fun.
Screenwriters Jason Reitman (Ivan’s son) and Gil Kenan (who also directs) cling to franchise basics like a security blanket, even more so than in their previous film, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” which the younger Reitman directed.
Their desire to connect the wisecracking characters and story of the 1984 “Ghostbusters” to the more earnest 21st-century younger players seems increasingly born of desperation rather than inspiration.
“Ghostbusters” originals Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson get slightly more screen time in “Frozen Empire” than their cameos of the past two instalments. The film also brings back other 1980s characters, toys, tropes and ghosts we already know, along with a return to New York City, where it all began.
Similarly recycled are the new Ghostbusters we met in “Afterlife,” the weird but heartfelt 2021 tale, set on an Oklahoma farm, that bid farewell to Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis, RIP), another classic Ghostbuster.
Spengler family members and associates who journey to NYC are pissed-off daughter Callie (Carrie Coon), precocious teen grandchildren Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and Callie’s trying-too-hard boyfriend Gary (Paul Rudd).
The frame is already crowded, but Reitman and Kenan insist on packing in more: sideshow loons played by comedians Kumail Nanjiani, Patton Oswalt and James Acaster; a young ghost played by “Gossip Girl” star Emily Alyn Lind, who befriends the lonely Phoebe; and repetitive appearances by the mini versions of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, who are clearly angling for their own spinoff kid-pic franchise.
This barely scratches the surface of the “Frozen Empire” roll call and it brings to mind the Twinkie brandished by Egon in the first “Ghostbusters” movie. He used the snack to describe how the busters’ ghost containment device in their New York firehall HQ (also back for a return engagement) would eventually explode from being packed with too many phantoms.
Like that cautionary Twinkie, “Frozen Empire” collapses from its own weight both narratively and cinematically. The CGI is overused — remember how much the original achieved with practical effects? — and Dario Marianelli’s anodyne score leans too much on classic horror film compositions.
The highly derivative plot, already revealed in the trailers, concerns the threat of a second Ice Age brought on by an army of ghosts. The phantoms are led by a fearsome new creep, Garraka, a malevolent ancient god who looks like the angry older brother of tree man Groot from the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise.
Anybody who can lift a proton pack — and it feels like almost every cast member, big or small — is deputized as a Ghostbuster to fight the scourge. “Frozen Empire” isn’t completely feeble. Fans who really like callbacks to earlier films will feel like they’ve hit the jackpot here. (Except for the underachieving 2016 female-led “Ghostbusters” film, which the franchise now weirdly ignores.)
The story arc for nerdy Phoebe builds on her winning “Afterlife” performance as Egon’s most convincing descendant. Lind’s ghostly Melody makes an impact as Phoebe’s new pal, despite her spectral constraints.
Nanjiani’s relics-hustling character Nadeem gets most of the film’s funnier lines. There aren’t many; Murray has exactly one. Nanjiani really gets the irreverent mood of “Ghostbusters” that made it one of the defining movies of the 1980s, a decade when boomer moviegoers flocked to see characters thumb their noses at the apocalypse and, by extension, the establishment.
That anarchic spirit is for the most part now in the rear-view mirror of the Ghostbusters’ clunky Ectomobile, which after “Frozen Empire” should be permanently parked outside a theme park haunted house.
‘Ghostbusters’ originals Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson get slightly more screen time in ‘Frozen Empire’ than their cameos of the past two instalments