GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Like its vault for containing trapped ghosts, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is creaky and overstuffed. Full of references to the 1984 original, it has a plot that’s more complicated that it needs to be, jarring errors in continuity and logic, and characters with little to do.

That’s a shame because, along with a passionate fan base, the Ghostbusters franchise often mixes screwball shenanigans with heart. The gentle reboot of 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, while uneven, struck the right notes, following the daughter and grandchildren of Egon Spengler (the late Harold Ramis) in Oklahoma. The family uncovered a paranormal secret and reconnected with the surviving Ghostbusters, giving Egon a proper sendoff.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire picks up roughly two years later but again feels caught between paying homage to the original film and continuing the story with the Spengler family. It’s dedicated to the original film’s director, Ivan Reitman, who died in 2022.

The film starts off on a promising note in 1904 as a fire crew with a horse-drawn wagon bolts from the future Ghostbusters’ firehouse headquarters. They arrive at the Manhattan Adventurers Club, where a tableful of men has been frozen solid, with giant icicles piercing through the floor and ceiling.

The only person untouched in the eerie tableau is a woman in bronze armor, holding an orb covered in tiny panels and glyphs—a type of ancient ghost trap.

In the present, the Spengler grandchildren, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace, Young Sheldon) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard, Stranger Things); their mom, Callie (Carrie Coon, The Gilded Age); and her boyfriend, Gary (Paul Rudd, Only Murders in the Building), a science teacher, have relocated from Oklahoma to the Manhattan firehouse to continue the Ghostbusting business. Original Ghostbuster Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson, Quantum Leap), now a successful entrepreneur, bankrolls the company but hasn’t reinforced the cracking wall around the basement containment unit or even fumigated the place.

The original team’s adversary, EPA investigator Walter Peck (William Atherton, Defiance), still fumes about the Ghostbusters, only now he’s the mayor and fixated on property damage. He makes a valid point, though, when he insists fifteen-year-old Phoebe not respond to calls until she’s eighteen, citing the dangers of a minor hanging out of the team’s vehicle. (Ecto-1 chasing a ghost at high speed on Manhattan streets will baffle anyone familiar with New York City traffic, as will an empty Washington Square Park after dark.)

While the grounded Phoebe mopes, striking up a friendship with a ghostly girl about her age (Emily Alyn Lind, Gossip Girl), Gary, Callie, and Trevor bust ghosts we never see. Meanwhile, Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani, Welcome to Chippendales), the armored woman’s grandson, sells the orb for cash at an occult bookstore run by original Ghostbuster Ray Stanz (Dan Aykroyd, Hotel Paranormal). Ray scans the orb, detecting paranormal energy off the charts but doesn’t research this until later.

Character inconsistencies aside, the script by Ivan Reitman, his son Jason Reitman (Ghostbusters: Afterlife) and director Gil Kenan (A Boy Called Christmas) leans on nostalgia far too much instead of taking the premise in a new direction. The copious references are as obvious as an early montage featuring 1980s toy commercials and the video for Ray Parker Jr.’s theme song. Slimer, the fan favorite gluttonous green ghost, pops up for a side plot that goes nowhere.

Admittedly, it’s fun to see Annie Potts (Young Sheldon) and Bill Murray (The Greatest Beer Run Ever) return as the acerbic Janine Melnitz and droll Peter Venkman, but neither has anything significant to do; Murray mostly reenacts two scenes from the original film crammed into one. Also tagging along are the kids’ friends from Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Podcast (Logan Kim), now a YouTuber, and Lucky (Celeste O’Connor).

The plot picks up steam when it focuses on the orb and the baddie within, an evil spirit that freezes people—and much of the city in July—by drawing on fear. Yet Phoebe’s melancholy slows the pacing considerably, and she makes a choice that might upset some viewers and their parents.

The closest Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire gets to the original’s loopy energy is through the warm-witted Nanjiani and the rapport among Grace, Aykroyd, and Patton Oswalt (Manhunt). As a paranormal researcher and Lovecraft aficionado, Oswalt drops exposition and one-liners amid a marvelous secret library hidden beneath the New York Public Library.

If the powers-that-be are determined to make the Ghostbusters repeat themselves, can we go back there again, please?