Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Review: An Ice Pick to the Heart

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Is an Ice Pick To the Heart of the Franchise

If Ghostbusters: Afterlife ignited pure rage inside my Ghostbusters-loving heart three years ago, then Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire was surely created to chill my soul and deaden my feelings to protect me from any more cinematic hurt.

Like a rube, a little piece of me believed that the earned criticisms leveled at Ghostbusters: Afterlife, accusing it of being a hollow exercise in nostalgia mining, would inspire writers Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman to take the notes and get creative with their miraculous second bat at the IP. Welp, the joke’s on me. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire doubles down, fully committing to its existence as a cynical nostalgia raid masquerading as a movie.

This time, Kenan takes over directing duties, with the duo churning out a screenplay that somehow wooed back a boatload of talent, including even more original Ghostbusters cast members, everyone from Afterlife, plus comedians who try their best, like Kumail Nanjiani, Patton Oswalt and James Acaster. But yet again, no one gets used to their potential! In fact, if you told me Kenan and Reitman fed every piece of Ghostbusters mythology into ChatGPT, hit return and shot exactly what was spat out, I’d 100% buy it.

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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire opens two years after the slapdash Ghostbusters: Afterlife tag that revealed OG Ghostbuster-turned-businessman Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) as the owner of the Ghostbusters’ firehouse and Ecto-1. The Spengler clan—Callie (Carrie Coon), Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard)—and Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) are now the residents of said firehouse and the operators of the still infamous Ghostbusters business. In the original, Venkman (Bill Murray), Egon (Harold Ramis) and Ray (Dan Ackroyd) sunk their last funds into a paranormal shingle because they’d been run out of academia and needed to eat. But here, no reason is provided for why two grown adults (and unpaid laborers Trevor and Phoebe) are bustin’ ghosts in the mean streets of New York with all the intention and expertise of random tourists. No one seems to have gained any passion, precision (judging by their crap aim) or even close to their 10,000 hours of knowledge in this pursuit. At least the OGs liked what they did.

Phoebe remains the only smart one in the family. But shooting up the City once too often gets the family slightly reprimanded by now-Mayor Walter Peck (William Atherton) for allowing an underaged teen with a nuclear reactor on her back and no work papers to run wild. So she gets benched from the business. That makes Phoebe mopey and rebellious, forcing her to make “dumb kid” screenplay decisions throughout the story that go against everything established about her character in the first movie. Bored, she turns to Uncle Ray, who still runs his occult store and now a cheesy YouTube show with Podcast (Logan Kim). If this is where you question how that kid made it to Manhattan, well, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has quite the tiny town problem. Seems like all of the Ghostbusters: Afterlife cast must have locked in rock-solid sequel deals because no one is left to the wayside, even when it makes no sense. Why is Podcast in the City? How is Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) randomly interning as a Ghostbuster with other New York parapsychologists, but somehow forgot to tell Trevor about it?

There are so many logic failures and headscratchers like this throughout the movie, you’ll give yourself a brain hemorrhage trying to track them all. Why has the Ecto-1 been outfitted with state-of-the-art drone landing pads, RC cars launchers and a gunner seat for Phoebe…but no air conditioning? How did those Gozer-conjured mini Stay-Puft Marshmallow men from Oklahoma somehow migrate to New York City like deranged pizza rats? Why haven’t Callie and Gary formally committed to one another, yet still live together? Just to confuse the kids?

Most intolerable for a film that opens with the Robert Frost poem “Fire and Ice,” Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’s script has the gall to conjure up an ancient villain, Garraka, who “freezes people in fright,” yet offers nothing even remotely scary in its hour-and-55-minute runtime. People freeze in this movie for no other reason than because the spirit makes things really cold. Help!

There’s also Kenan and Reitman’s absolute commitment to repeat exactly the same beats, plot points and once-funny jokes from Ghostbusters into this film in the least imaginative ways possible. The Slimer monster? Transposed here as an anemic side mission (with product placement!) for Wolfhard to suffer through. The once-climactic containment unit breach? Back again with absolutely zero lessons learned in the ensuing four decades. Remember Venkman’s hilarious psychic interrogation of college students, repeated poorly in the Afterlife tag? It’s back, with poor Nanjiani left to power through the same tired gag alongside a Murray clearly bored to tears.

Speaking of Murray, if you’re buying what the movie posters are selling—that it’s featuring the original Ghostbusters line-up like they’ll actually be integrated into the movie—know it’s a bait and switch. Murray’s Venkman shows up randomly, like a phantom, possessing no narrative purpose, possessing no scenes with his former cohorts that might explain what the character even does now. Hudson is still an exposition generator. But to the actor’s credit, he continues to do the job with enthusiasm and some panache. Potts is used even less here than in Afterlife, so her suiting up is entirely performative. Ackroyd’s Ray is used the most here, but in nonsensical ways. As the character who has always been unabashedly giddy about the supernatural, it is baffling to witness a Ray who is entirely blasé about observing wild supernatural occurrences that would typically have him cracking the books and going into action mode.

But all of this mess is what happens when you craft a film that’s just surface artifice, possessing not a single iota of original storytelling to move these characters forward or give them anything to do that isn’t a repeat of something better that came before. All I can hope is that Gilman and Reitman are truly spent now, having rehashed every last crumb of what made Ghostbusters special and unique into this pair of forgettable retreads. I don’t think any of us can survive a trilogy.

Director: Gil Kenan
Writer: Gil Kenan, Jason Reitman
Starring: Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, McKenna Grace, Paul Rudd, Logan Kim, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton, Kumail Nanjiani, Patton Oswalt
Release Date: March 23, 2024

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios, Avatar: The Way of Water and the upcoming The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Is an Ice Pick To the Heart of the Franchise