The Ghostbusters franchise is no longer intended for anyone or anything

It is no longer really clear who the Ghostbusters franchise is intended for. In Jason Reitman’s 2021 sequel/reboot, Ghostbusters: AfterlifeIt seemed like the series had a clear trajectory and was aiming to finally make it the children’s franchise that Halloween costume companies had always dreamed of. But the last entry, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empireclings so tightly to the franchise’s past that it’s hard to see how it could appeal to anyone at all.

Frozen realm is a direct sequel to Afterlife, featuring the Spengler family – Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), her mother Callie (Carrie Coon), brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Callie’s maybe-now-boyfriend? Greg (Paul Rudd), chasing ghosts in New York City. It’s not really clear how long they’ve been doing this, but after doing one job, the family is quickly shut down by the town’s mayor, former Environmental Protection Officer Walter Peck (William Atherton, returned from 1984 prison). Ghostbustersbecause nothing in this franchise should age gracefully).

When Atherton appears, the film pauses so Reitman can congratulate himself on landing yet another film Ghostbusters legacy character. He almost begs the fans to applaud. Even more unpleasant, however, is that the new cast reacts as if they have also seen the original film. They roll their eyes at his tantrums and somehow perfectly understand his long-standing vendetta against the Ghostbusters, as if to say the family is with us.

This bizarre relationship and reverence for the franchise’s history plagues the film at every turn. Surviving ’80s Ghostbusters Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) reappear, but it’s less clear than ever why exactly they appear in this story. While their goal in Afterlife It seemed like a clear passing of the torch, now that the action has returned to New York City they just seem to be part of the gang. In fact, they seem to have almost as much screen time as all the new Ghostbusters – except Phoebe, who Grace manages to make one of the new Ghostbusters. Frozen realm‘s few real bright spots. But all that screen time for the old stars is simply wasted.

Once among the funniest actors in Hollywood, the gang is now an over-the-hill band indistinguishable from its cover acts. Aykroyd, Murray, and Hudson know the material here isn’t great, and they’re certainly not interested in taking it to the next level. They all give “I’m getting paid anyway” performances of the highest order. And who can blame them when much of the film’s script, written by Reitman and director Gil Kenan (Monster house), is dedicated to explaining its labyrinthine plot?

Aside from a few brief moments of ghostly activity, the rest of the film’s dialogue is devoted to having characters explain new Ghostbusting technology or Patton Oswalt’s librarian character explaining the villain’s half-baked knowledge. Frozen realm seems much more interested in exposition than ghosts. For all its apparent reverence for the original film, the visual gags, screwball comedy, and surprisingly effective scares that made the 1984 film so good Ghostbusters exactly the elements are great Frozen realm‘s creators don’t want to make time for it.

Jokes in the new film are almost exclusively relegated to gags and one-liners. The actors do their best to sell the punchlines, especially newcomer James Acaster as a funny British paranormal scientist, but none can salvage bits that seem straight out of a C-tier Marvel movie. Thor: Love and thunder or Rudd’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Meanwhile, the film’s only shocks come when the musical themes from the original film emerge and break through Frozen realm‘s otherwise dull and generally dramatic score to remind us that this series was once fun, energetic, and full of life, before it felt like just another spooky wax museum.

Image: Sony Images

And yet, despite all the space that Kenan and Reitman create through carefully and systematically everything that even remotely resembles pleasure Frozen realm, the plot and the villain still don’t make much sense. There’s an ancient god who helped a warlord who ultimately betrayed him, and now the god is back for revenge. Why is the god still seeking revenge so many years later? Why is he more powerful now than before? These questions remain unanswered and unacknowledged. What’s even more baffling is that even though the characters spend most of the film talking about the villain, he doesn’t actually show up until the 90-minute mark. Frozen realmThe grueling 115-minute runtime, and it’s dispatched in the blink of an eye, without any involvement from Ghostbuster.

All of which brings us back to that opening problem: the Ghostbusters franchise doesn’t really seem to be focused on anyone anymore. It’s not funny. It’s not scary. It has largely abandoned its new, younger characters, and the older actors hardly seem to care. Frozen realm‘s unintentional answer to the question seems to be that Ghostbusters is now corporate nostalgia farming in a cinematic form. Of course, it lacks all the charm and silliness that the original deserved Ghostbusters so many fans – but if you stick around long enough, the filmmakers will show off the proton packs again, and there’s always someone new to slime. It’s a franchise that has been reduced to nothing more than a parade of hollow, familiar images, lightly repackaged in the hopes that we’ll buy another ticket and try to relive the emotions we felt when we first encountered this world.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire will be in cinemas from March 22.