Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire doesn’t make you feel good

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Talk of nuclear war dominate the news headlines, Kate Bush and Kylie Minogue are chart-toppers again and the Ghostbusters are back.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the latest attempt at bringing the Ghostbusters into the modern day and making the magic of the 1984 Ivan Reitman original strike again.

As we learned from Ghostbusters: Afterlife in 2021, Bill Murray and the gang should have stayed in the Reagan era.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire builds on the story from the 2021 legacy sequel which attempted to give Ghostbusters its own version of The Force Awakens.

The novelty of seeing Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd and Ernie Hudson suit up one last time and pass the torch onto a new generation is the major sell of this film and it recalls that one Simpsons episode that parodies a new Star Trek movie with the original cast in their old age.

Bringing back the late, great Harold Ramis in CGI ghost form in Afterlife was terribly undignified, and seeing a grey-haired, sleepy Bill Murray strap on a proton pack is just sad.

Ghostbusters is not a franchise that needed to be treated with the reverence of Star Wars or Indiana Jones in the first place; it had one pretty great film in 1984 and one sequel people pretended to like in 1989 because it has that bit with the Statue of Liberty.

Following on from Afterlife, we see Paul Rudd and his team set up shop in the iconic firehouse and become New York’s premiere ghost-hunting team.

They are joined by Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard and young star McKenna Grace does a rather uncanny impression of Harold Ramis.

Grace is the strongest part of the film and when the film asks her character to embrace being a Spengler, there is some genuine heart.

In those moments, the film justifies its existence.

The cast tries their best to work with what they are given and Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon try in vain to add some improvisational comedy-adjacent humour to proceedings.

Rudd and Coon going off-script and coming up with fun little moments is the film trying incredibly hard to match the shaggy feeling of the original and it nearly pulls it off.

The rug is then pulled out from under the film when we cut to scenes with Egon, Ray and Winston and the film comes to a screeching halt.

Ghostbusters having one foot in the past and one foot in the future means that the film is unfocused to a fault.

The estate of Anton Chekov may well sue for egregious use of the Chekov’s Gun technique; the film does not trust the audience to keep track of what was said 10 minutes ago and is incredibly unsubtle in setting up plot points that will pay off later on.

Gil Kenan has been drafted in to direct, and his past in animation serves him well.

Kenan has some decent visual ideas and the film boasts some decent scary moments in the classic Ghostbusters style but once again, he hampers the film by making callbacks to the original.

An exciting chase scene through a library is stopped dead in its tracks just so the film can re-enact the bit with the library ghost from the beginning of the first film.

It’s a Family Guy-level attempt at humour and nostalgia, hitting the audience over the head with a hammer and shouting “hey, remember this?”

Closing the film out with the Ray Parker Junior song is a last-ditch attempt to win over the audience that is most assuredly checked out.

It is truly remarkable that talented actors such as Rudd and Coon signed on to what is basically a fan film with a $100 million dollar budget.

There is very little reason for this film to exist outside of wanting to release a new Ghostbusters film to tie into the 40th anniversary of the original and convince people that the franchise is still worth caring about.

This is a mistake on Sony’s part; they think audiences wanted this to become a franchise to begin with.

The sweet moolah associated with egregious crisp and oreo product placements probably twisted their arm.

The original Ghostbusters was an accidental hit that executives spent years trying to replicate much like how Radiohead stumbled upon Creep and realised it was a massive albatross.

There is an okay family comedy buried deep in here somewhere, but you need oil drilling equipment to come even close to finding the good stuff.

Some things are better left in the past.