There are times as a film critic that I wonder why I allocate my spare time to the watching and writing about movies. This is one such occasion. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a profoundly bad film, one that seems to be actively sucking the very lifeblood out of the movie industry with its lazy indifference, indifferent storytelling, and filmmaking incompetence. In a way, it’s actually more interesting as a cultural microcosm of the horrors of modern franchise filmmaking writ large. It exists in a world of franchise as mandated IP flexing. Strictly a means to an end. Ostensibly the opposite of a write-off but with the same underlying purpose. Done because it must be done to preserve intellectual property ownership, not because there is any purpose, vision, or passion involved.
Not since Jurassic World: Dominion has a once-beloved piece of Hollywood iconography been grafted to such soulless filmmaking, turning that act itself into an aggressive pastiche, mocking the nature of storytelling with meaningless manufactured yarning. A truly painful exercise in nihilistic nothingness, scored with terrifically cringy dialogue, a black hole of character development, and stuffed to the point of bursting a proton pack with endlessly lame jokes, there isn’t a single element in this reboot sequel that feels like the creative vision of any single human being. That is to say: per Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the state of IP filmmaking is in a very bad place. Or maybe A.I. just wrote it.
It’s a credit to the absolute neuralyzer that is the 2021 reboot from Jason Reitman, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, that I could not remember a single thing that happened in that movie coming into this sequel. Sure the faces onscreen were generally familiar and I recall a questionable Ivan Reitman tribute but beyond the fact that there were ghosts who needed bustin’, I couldn’t tell you a single plot point without a quick stopover on Wikipedia. Now I don’t believe it’s the duty of this follow-up to rehash those events, nor would I ask a film to handhold any audience through that, however, typically as an audience is re-introduced to characters and their dynamics, there’s that aha moment, where you remember how the pieces fit together and how characters are connected to each others and why they mean something to one another. Broadly, who is who and what is what and why people do what it is that they’re doing. This is not the case here. Watching Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, I struggled throughout to figure out what any of these people wanted and what they meant to each other. And that’s before the whole world freeze over. Frankly, I still don’t know and I certainly don’t care.
Sure, there’s surface level details to this vast expanse of an ensemble cast but they’re buried beneath such dreadfully platitude-riddled circumstances that to even call them details is to significantly overstate the writing from Reitman. And any film capable of making Carrie Coon look this wildly out of place onscreen should be buried six feet under where it belongs. The massive cast includes McKenna Grace, Paul Rudd, Finn Wolfhard, Emily Alyn Lind, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, James Acaster, and Logan Kim and no one other than Grace really gets a chance to make any impression, though Murray, per usual, gets a few licks in. No one involved seems to know the magic of addition by subtracting, adding more and more faces (old, new, cameo, and blue) to the mix without ever justifying why anyone is actually there.
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The trend of IP franchise filmmaking increasingly resembles grave robbing. This film manages to exhume the corpses of its predecessors only to parade them around in a grotesque display of commercial opportunism. The jokes, which range from dated references to crypto bros and Twitch streamers to cursed physical comedy, are painfully unfunny – though I will admit that some in my audience hooted and hollered up a storm. Meanwhile, I was frozen over by this Ghostbuster’s haunting lack of scares, laughs, and entertainment power.
Moreover, the filmmaking itself from director Gil Kenan is alarmingly bland. There’s a distinct lack of composition or film grammar, rendering every scene profoundly uninteresting. The visual storytelling is non-existent, as if the filmmakers operated under the assumption that the mere presence of familiar characters and iconography would be enough to satisfy audiences. As evidenced by the aforementioned gleeful handful, apparently this is enough to service those who accept an easy servicing.
This trend of utterly bland commercialism as nostalgia baiting, where we encounter naught but a hollow shell where a movie should be, is more scary than any of the ostensibly ghastly content herein. It’s a reminder that cinema, at its best, creates something new. And cinema at its worst, recycles that thing until all life has been drained from it entirely. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire feeds on certain audiences’ rampant craving for the familiar. Instead of invigorating the franchise with fresh ideas or perspectives, it settles for the lowest common denominator, offering nothing new or even funny. I know who I’m not going to call.
CONCLUSION: Poorly directed, terribly paced, entirely lacking in character development, painfully unfunny, and – worst of all – wholly soulless, ‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’, like many reboot sequels before it, reminds us why this franchise died when it did. Please put it back in the Containment Unit immediately.
D
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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