Is it the Return of Cinema? No. But that’s fine. It’s a sequel to a second-attempt reboot of a 40-year-old comedy franchise. It can just be that, and that’s okay. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has gotten a chilly (ha, get it??) reception so far, and perhaps that’s attributable to fatigue from sequels of reboots of reboots of sequels, which is understandable. People are starved for novelty in today's wasteland of emaciated zombie IP. But we should evaluate movies based on what they’re trying to be, and, more importantly, what they’re not trying to be.
Frozen Empire is pretty fun. It was obviously meant to be fun. It’s got Paul Rudd and Kumail Nanjiani. It’s got nostalgia. It’s got a queer teen supernatural quasi-romance. There’s a tall Boss Ghost with cool horns and icy breath. It’s campy and cheesy at times, and it doesn’t make you think.
The original didn’t either. The original put some great comedic performers together and gave them memorable opponents (versions of which make an appearance in this film) and a funny looking car and funky equipment and dumb overalls. The new version preserves all that but tones down the lewdness a bit to be okay for younger audiences—after all, fans of the original likely have kids (or grandkids) now and will probably want to see it as a family.
Speaking of families, this movie starts with a new addition to one. Gary Grooberson (Rudd) has recently married into the Spengler family, which, now that Egon himself has passed on, consists of the original ghostbuster’s daughter Callie (Carrie Coon) and her two children Trevor (Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things fame) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace). Phoebe takes after her grandfather with her incredible scientific mind and ends up being the focus in this one. At the outset of the film, we see them ghostbusting like old times, pursuing a spectral dragon through Manhattan while causing thousands of dollars in public property damage and getting in trouble with the mayor (a trope that will never die).
Meanwhile, a desperate-for-money Nadeem Razmaadi (Nanjiani) stumbles into Ray Stantz’s (O.G. Dan Ackroyd) occult pawn shop with a relic from his recently deceased grandmother's back room: a mysterious brass orb with intricate markings in an ancient language. The orb nearly fries the spectrometer, and the characters start digging into what it could possibly contain. If you’ve seen the trailer, you probably know it’s something big and horned and cold.
While Rudd and Nanjiani aren’t quite as high in the rankings of all-time greatest comedic actors as Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd, they are still very much able to boost a film to a higher level with their charm. The kids do a solid job, with most of the difficult emotional work landing on the shoulders of Mckenna Grace, who portrays 15-year-old Phoebe struggling with typical teenage problems of loneliness and frustration with not being "old enough" to do things she wants to do.
Appearances from Bill Murray and Annie Potts provide the nostalgic fan-service we’ve come to expect from modern reboots, but Bill Murray has either lost some appeal with the modern audience or has just phoned it in here, because his appearance doesn't quite land. That said, they haven’t asked him to do much outside of a few lines and an “all together now, boys” reunion moment.
Yes, this all could have been prevented if Phoebe just listened to her mom and her step-dad, but if teenagers in movies started doing that, we’d have really boring movies. And I wouldn’t count this as one. Do your thing, teenagers.
