Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

1hr 55mins (12A)

Pointless addition to the labouring franchise ★★

“The Ghostbusters are back,” said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph – and it looks as if they’ll be kept busy, given “how many cinemagoers” will surely “die of boredom” watching their new film. There is “noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise”, which picks up where the last one (2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife) left off, except that the family at the heart of it – Callie (Carrie Coon) and her teenage children (Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace) – are now living in Manhattan, running the Ghostbuster business from its old HQ in a former firehouse. It was a good idea to bring the action back to New York, but alas, this is a film with no fresh ideas, no real plot, and not even much ghostbusting. Instead, we have to sit through “an hour and 15 minutes of skull-numbing preamble” in order to meet “a generic demon whose special powers are cold breath and making icicles pop out of the ground”.

There are “one or two” decent gags, but the film exhibits “no real signs of life”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: even Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson and Dan Aykroyd, reprising their roles from the original, seem bizarrely detached from proceedings. It’s surely time for Hollywood to let this franchise “join Jurassic World and Aquaman in the bin and think of something new”. The original Ghostbusters was a massive hit and “got Hollywood excited by the comedic potential of special effects”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. This film has likeable principals, and some entertaining set pieces, but the plot meanders and, like “many of the best ghosts”, it all feels rather shapeless. At “no point was I as enchanted as I was watching the last film, or indeed the first one”.