We keep going for movies that reboot old favourites hoping that they will at some point be able to capture the magic of the original and it is rare to find one that matches up. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire isn’t that rarity.
Directed by Gil Kenan and written by Kenan and Jason Reitman, the film takes off from Ghostbusters: Afterlife, with the Spenglers — Callie (Carie Coon), her daughter Phoebe (McKenna Grace), son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and science teacher-turned-beau Gary Gooberson (Paul Rudd) — and their close friends settled into the New York City firehouse that was the base for the original gang.
Frozen Empire starts off well enough with a strange occurrence in 1904, then shifts to Ecto-1 zipping through the streets of New York in pursuit of a spectral sewer dragon. It is fun to see Phoebe using the gunner seat to take charge. But the thrill runs out soon after, with old school Ghostbusters fun popping up in spurts.
The story revolves around an ancient evil god trapped in an orb that threatens annihilation. The orb makes its way to Ray Stantz (Dan Akroyd) via an amusing layabout, Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani), who sells it to Ray for fifty bucks not knowing that he comes from a legacy of power.
It’s not that Frozen Empire is boring. There are some sequences, like the garbage bag chase through the library and the stone lion, that make you wish there were more of those. But it just doesn’t have the zing. There is no snark, quotable quotes and no jokes that make you laugh out loud that were a trademark of the original two films. Well, there is that Venkman dialogue “Tall, dark and horny at 12 o’clock”, but it has been shown in the trailers and even memed.
McKenna Grace does a fair job of depicting the teenager feeling left out, but Finn Wolfhard is wasted in a role that sees him flailing around all his gangly limbs rather than actually doing much. Kumail Nanjiani is a hoot as is Patton Oswalt as a linguistics professor, and that’s more like the Ghostbusters we have all grown up loving.
The OG Ghostbusters Ray, Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) and Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) show up too and get to do much more than they did in Afterlife, even though it felt like Murray would rather have been somewhere else. Even Walter Peck (Willian Atherton), the Ghostbusters’ long-time antagonist, shows up.
Sometimes this expanded role of the OG cast is to the detriment of new blood making space for themselves. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire can’t seem to decide whether to bank on nostalgia or trust the new cast to pull it off, resulting in a mishmash that neither captures the old magic nor adds anything new. Maybe it is time to park the Ecto-1 and leave us to our nostalgia.
