Franchise’s newest caper big on CGI, heart, but low on jokes
The “Ghostbusters” franchise follows no reason or rhyme, which ordinarily I prefer with my franchises.
I mean, yes, of course: Money’s the reason. So far, we’ve had the huge hit “Ghostbusters” (1984) followed by a pretty funny, less-of-a-hit sequel (1989), a ridiculously divisive female-led reboot (2016), followed by the aggressively heartwarming melee “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” (2021).
Now we have “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” in the “Afterlife” vein and a tick better. My beef is simple. “Frozen Empire,” named for its phantom god adversary’s threatened Second Ice Age, does not qualify as a comedy.
It’s an effects-slathered action fantasy crammed with family matters, sincerely handled, and augmented by an intriguing friendship between Mckenna Grace’s Phoebe Spengler and the melancholy teenage ghost (Emily Alyn Lind) she befriends.
This element in director Gil Kenan’s screenplay, co-written with Jason Reitman, works well.
And it might’ve come to more if the rest of “Frozen Empire” figured out how to establish and sustain the right comic spirit, instead of shrugging off the jokes.
Nostalgia, meanwhile, may be enough to put it over. “Afterlife” alums Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon return, which helps, along with the rest of the Spengler offspring and affiliated young people. The old guard’s back too: Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Bill Murray, even William Atherton, still sniveling, still determined to condemn the Manhattan firehouse and ghost containment center where the characters played by Coon and Rudd now call home.
The latest threat to Earth arrives in the form of a mystical orb (Kumail Nanjiani plays its unwitting owner). It’s fun, every so often, to hang out with these characters again as they cope with domestic issues, city politics, tiny Stay-Puft marshmallow sailors and “The Day After Tomorrow”-sized climate change.
But the bombastic digital effects, which audiences
have by now been trained to endure in half the films they see, amounts to just that: stuff. Big, dull, digital stuff. I wish I had a more sophisticated objection to the stuff, beyond its dampening effect on the movie’s attempts to give us a good time. It will be for some; for me, the movie’s essentially the Spenglers vs. the Machines, aka the Stuff.
Lest we forget, the ’84
“Ghostbusters” slung a lot of that stuff around too. If it weren’t for Bill Murray’s invaluable skill of underplaying while everything else was going big, would this franchise have survived this long?
It was a weird fluke to begin with, hardly original: an embiggened ghost comedy for a new generation, full of “Saturday Night Live” and Second City pros, riffing on an
early 1940s spate of ghost comedies (“Ghost Breakers” with Bob Hope; “Hold that Ghost” with Abbott and Costello) and pumped up for huge effects. I was squarely in that film’s target audience back then, though I was a lot happier with “Stripes.”
Just about everybody on screen in “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” lightens the load. But sometime around the eighth or
ninth round of expository mumbo-jumbo concerning the ectoplasmic nightmare about to happen, the movie starts moving sideways, not forward. Hate to say it, but: Hold that ghost, indeed.
MPA rating: PG-13 (for supernatural action/ violence, language and suggestive references) Running time: 1:55
How to watch: In theaters