Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Grade: C

Imagine a chef spread thinly, making a little bit of progress on many dishes, instead of preparing just one meal they can put all their focus on and knock out of the park. That’s how Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire plays. It has so many characters and subplots, and clumsily pinballs from one to another, then back around when it seems to realize “hey, we haven’t seen this actor or heard about this thing for a while.”

This is in the same universe as the “legacyquel” Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), which was a – 32 years later – direct sequel to Ghostbusters II. The 2016 woman-led reboot is an outlier. It would have been fun to have found a way to incorporate them, but Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has enough going on already. The late Egon Spengler’s descendants we met in Afterlife all return. They are Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon) and her children – 18-year-old Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and 15-year-old Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) – with Paul Rudd as Gary, the “step-teacher” boyfriend. The relationship gets increasingly more serious.

These junior Spenglers are now residing and working out of the iconic New York City firehouse. There’s something strange in the neighborhood, and this time it’s a metal orb that unleashes an ancient monster that plans to cover the city, if not the world, with a permanent ice age. The last thing you’ll see, Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) explains, is your tear ducts freezing up. Also, the containment chamber that has held 40 years’ worth of ghosts is pretty full, and they have to go somewhere.

Most of the primary cast members from the original 1984 film appear here. Aykroyd has the largest role of them, with a close-second being Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson). Bill Murray as Peter Venkman and Annie Potts as Janine Melnitz aren’t much more than glorified cameos, there just to be there. William Atherton is back as Walter Peck, the mayor we’ve loved to hate for 40 years. Of the new generation, Mckenna Grace gets to shine the most with a couple nice moments, including her ongoing late night chess games in Central Park with an unexpected guest. Coon and Wolfhard aren’t given much to do, and Rudd is mostly there as a Ned Flandersish Dad Joke teller.

I was very lukewarm on Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, but there are a couple of Easter eggs I caught and appreciated. When Rudd suggests a family movie night, the VHS he whips out is Cannibal Girls, directed by Ivan Reitman (a recurring reference in Ghostbusters movies). Also, when they need a lighter, nobody has one, as the older men comment that they quit smoking in 1989. The first movie – unexpectedly – had quite a following among children, so for Ghostbusters II, they decided to have the characters ditch the cigarettes, and toned down the adult humor and double entendres. “Bustin’ makes me feel good.” I get it now. That could mean more than one thing.

Grade: C