'Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire' Is Bad, but Easy to Watch

Thank Gozer for small miracles.

THE NO-SPOILERS VERSION

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a more watchable movie than 2021’s abysmal Ghostbusters: Afterlife - but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a better one. Afterlife co-writer Gil Kenan takes over directing duties here, and while he mercifully imbues the film with a much lighter tone which allows for some genuinely funny moments (most involving Kumail Nanjiani or Paul Rudd), that’s really just about the only thing that he gets right.

Although some treat it today like the Holy Scriptures, it’s important to remember that the original 1984 Ghostbusters came from the creative team behind Meatballs and Stripes. It has no real story (by which I mean it’s not actually trying to convey any larger meaning, and none of the characters go through any kind of emotional journey or re-education), the plot is childishly simple, there’s only a handful of characters of import, and all of them have clear, straightforward motivations. That was by design - the real point of the movie was to allow a talented ensemble of comedic actors moments to do hilarious things, and in that regard, it succeeds in spades. Ghostbusters works because we enjoy spending time with this group of quirky, often-dumb characters. It has no grander aspirations because it didn’t need any to work.

By way of contrast, Frozen Empire has a painfully labyrinthine plot and a main cast equal in size to the population of Wyoming. It simply does not allot enough time for us to fall in love with any of its characters the way we did the first cast forty years ago. Its insistence on including the original cast, the cast of Afterlife, new characters, and a reference to Ghostbusters ‘84 every 2.8 second means it can only breathlessly leap from loud, nonsensical event to loud, nonsensical event. And the irony is, slowing down to spend time with the characters is the only thing the audience wants from the flick!

There is no way to give a concise explanation of Frozen Empire’s set-up, because, again, there’s too many characters with too many plotlines.

In OG Ghostbusters, there are eight characters of whom the audience has to keep track: the four team members - Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray (Dan Akroyd), Egon (Harold Ramis), and Winston (Ernie Hudson) - and their client, Dana (Sigourney Weaver); Dana’s neighbor, Lewis (Rick Moranis); the Ghostbusters’ secretary, Janine (Annie Potts); and Walter Peck (William Atherton), an inspector for the EPA who runs afoul of the Ghostbusters by daring to care about the environment (some might also advocate for the movie’s big bad, Gozer, but I’d argue Gozer is closer to a MacGuffin than an actual character). There are other entertaining people who come and go, but they’re not all that significant, as made clear by the fact that we generally know them by their professions and not their names (e.g., the librarian, the hotel manager, the mayor, etc.).

In Frozen Empire, there are FOURTEEN characters of characters of whom the audience has to keep track: the four members of the new team, two of their friends from Afterlife, the three surviving members of the old team, Janine, Walter Peck (who is now the mayor, and runs afoul of the Ghostbusters by daring to care about the well-being of a 15-year-old girl), and three new characters (again, not counting the main villain). As a result, everyone mostly gets split up into teams that all have different storylines - kinda like Avengers: Infinity War, but much worse, because the characters in Infinity War all had a clear, unified objective (keep the magic stones away from the bad guy), and most of the characters in Frozen Empire don’t really do very much anything.

So here’s the actual non-spoiler plot summary for this movie:

Ray, the adolescent boy from Afterlife he now clandestinely keeps in his basement (Logan Kim), and a new character, Nadeem (Nanjiani), investigate an ancient orb that houses an evil entity.

Meanwhile, Egon’s granddaughter, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), is sad because she’s been benched from the team after Walter Peck noted that maybe a teenager shouldn’t be allowed to run around New York City with a nuclear accelerator strapped to her back; she soon begins a romance with Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), the ghost of a girl who died in the 1860 tenement fire and desperately misses her family, who did not become ghosts for some reason (fret not - the romance Phoebe and Melody remains implicit and chaste, lest Sony face the wrath of those would object to besmirching this wholesome franchise in which Dan Akroyd once got a blowjob from a ghost).

Meanwhile, Phoebe’s brother, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), tries to capture Slimer, who is squatting in the Ghostbusters’ basement.

Meanwhile, Gary (Paul Rudd), Phoebe and Trevor’s science teacher-turned-stepdad, struggles to discipline kids that are not his own (he must have been a swell teacher).

Meanwhile, an engineer (James Acaster) and his intern (Celeste O’Connor, also returning from Afterlife to continue her very bad year) must figure out a way to fix the Ghostbusters’ containment unit, which, like this movie, is now well over its safe occupancy level.

Meanwhile, Janine has to call Winston (seriously, that is her most important purpose in this film).

Meanwhile, the kids’ mother/Gary’s partner, Callie (Carrie Coon), has to do laundry.

You may have noticed that I didn’t even mention Venkman, and that’s because, despite his prominent placement in the marketing materials, he’s barely in the movie. I think Sony’s gestapo probably only managed to tranq him and make him read lines from cue cards for a couple of days. How they let Sigourney Weaver slip through their fingers and make it to a non-extradition country, however, we'll never know.

Only two of these storylines really end up being important. It’s easy to envision a version of Frozen Empire in which Ray’s child hostage, the engineer, the engineer’s intern, and every member of the original cast has been excised; that would have made room for Callie and Trevor to have actual storylines, for Gary’s whole struggle-to-be-a-dad arc to breathe and seem semi-meaningful, and for all of these characters to get time shine and be funny. Better yet, they could have made a Ghostbusters movie with Rudd, Coon, Nanjiani, Oswalt, and no kids, and it probably would have been a thousand times better (it’s hard to stress how much they continue to waste Coon in these movies).

But no. Ray and his ward MUST go see an ancient languages expert (Patton Oswalt) at the main branch of the New York Public Library, so they can put it in all the trailers and remind everyone how much they love the scene from the first Ghostbusters where they go to the same location.

In case you can’t tell from my tone: it’s annoying to be smacked in the face with a throwback to the first movie in literally every scene. At least Frozen Empire is the first Ghostbusters sequel to try and build out the mythology and not just immediately hit the reset button. Still, it’s not really a film - it’s a line item.

THE SPOILERS VERSION - ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER

Look. In an ideal world, it would not matter that everything that happens in Frozen Empire is so incredibly stupid. I reiterate: the plot of Ghostbusters is elementary and borderline-irrelevant to our enjoyment of the film. A significant amount of what happens in that movie makes no real sense at all. Like, if Slimer is confined to the twelfth floor of the hotel, how does he get to the ballroom in the lobby? And if he can pass through walls (which we see he can), why does he remain in the ballroom even after the Ghostbusters start firing their proton packs at him? They act like he’s trapped in there, but he is most definitely not.

It doesn’t matter, though, because we like the characters, and the scene is so goddamn funny.

But Frozen Empire works SO hard to squeeze in SO many people that, ironically, it winds up favoring plot over character. And suddenly, all the many, many, MANY ways in which this movie makes no goddamn sense feels distracting.

Here’s a list of observations that arose in my mind while watching Frozen Empire:

• At the end of the first big action scene, which is a car chase, the Ghostbusters crash the Ecto-1 into a row of Citi Bikes, and are thus called in to see Mayor Walter Peck. Which I’m sure is what really happens when you’re responsible for a minor traffic accident in Manhattan: you’re brought directly before the highest elected official in the city.

• Regarding the re-introduction to the Ghostbusters in their firehouse (after the car chase): I think the first half of this scene was re-shot and the second half of this scene was originally intended to appear later in the movie. Trevor notes some fungus coming from the attic, which is setting up his electrifying subplot of trying to catch Slimer. But then, like twenty seconds later, he goes to eat some chips and the chips all fall out of what’s supposed to be the sealed end of the bag, and he goes, “Oh, they got into the snacks again!” Who is “they,” if not Slimer? It’s not the Stay Puft Marshmallow Minions - we learn they’re in someone else’s possession in a later scene. And Trevor definitely doesn’t already know Slimer is up there - the first time he sees Slimer, he’s surprised. So. Yeah. This is confusing.

• Speaking of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Minions… how are they still alive if they were brought about by Gozer in the last film, and Gozer has since been vanquished?

• Seriously, NOBODY has a problem with Ray keeping a kid in his basement without the knowledge or consent of that child’s parents?

• Ray’s re-introduction finds him torturing an octogenarian widow. The whole scene could have been cut from the movie with no consequence, but they left that in because making old ladies weep is just SO friggin’ hilarious.

• When we first meet the engineer’s intern, she’s testing dangerous, volatile experimental weapons, which sure does seem like an inappropriate task to assign to an intern.

• Nadeem watches the orb give off so much supernatural power as to blow up Ray’s EKG meter and cause an earthquake… and then sells it to Ray for a whopping fifty bucks.

• Winston reveals that the big explosion Peck caused in the first movie after inadvertently freeing all the ghosts in the containment unit caused a “rift” that is “a potential gateway to the other side.” As a consequence, the firehouse is now “the finger in the dam.” Does this have anything to do with why the containment unit is on the fritz? No. Is the containment unit being overfull a storyline that ever actually pays off? No. So why is the subplot about the containment unit in this movie? Who can say?

• When Melody wants to get Phoebe’s attention after they first meet, she goes and sits in the Melody Diner (yuk yuk), presumably hoping that the staff will call the Ghostbusters. But then, when Phoebe shows up, Melody runs away. After Phoebe gets back to the firehouse, Melody is there waiting for her. So why didn’t Melody just go directly to the firehouse? She knew Phoebe was a Ghostbuster, and the Ghostbusters’ HQ is public knowledge. Is the diner scene in the movie just because someone assumed the audience would get bored if we didn’t see a proton pack for like ten minutes?

• Okay. So. The primary villain is Garraka, a ghost whose powers include the ability to control other ghosts. Eventually, we learn that Garraka has made a deal with Melody: if she honeypots Phoebe so Garraka can briefly take control of Phoebe’s body and use to her to free himself, he’ll reunite Melody with her family in the beyond. Melody is, understandably, bummed that she has to betray Phoebe. But… if Garraka can control other ghosts… why does he need Melody to willingly participate? Can’t he just control Melody and maker her do his bidding? For that matter, how is Melody able to fight back against Garraka in the big finale?

• To control Phoebe, Melody manipulates her into using a machine at the Ghostbusters’ secret experimental lab, which can separate her spirit from her body for two minutes. During that time, Garraka can possess Phoebe’s spirit and make her body say the magic words to free him (the words have to be said by a human to work). But… how did Garraka know that machine existed? Did Garraka have a back-up plan here, or…?

• How can Garraka withstand being blasted by seven proton beams all at once, but then be hurt by Phoebe’s one single beam?

• We’re told that Garraka can induce a “death chill,” in which he scares people so badly they die. But he doesn’t scare anyone, and no one freezes to death from fear; he attacks with actual ice and sub-zero temperatures. So… um… what?

• How much restraint do you think it took for the filmmakers not to put in a post-credits scene teasing the return of Vigo the Carpathian?