Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
How many more ghosts can you fit into the firehouse in ‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’? This bloated endlessly amusing installment in the forty-year-old series features four supporting characters from the first 1984 blue-eyed blockbuster, six from Jeremy Kahn’s 2021 Gunters: Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and all the three new witches along with several ghosts and bunch of bland soulless marshmallow men.
It reached the point when a maximum of a dozen heroes swarm at the old billowing headquarter of the Ghostbusters in Manhattan who are supposed to guard a storage trap filled with ghouls which has got, like the movie, quite dangerously sardined.
The sequences where the Director Gil Kenan, who co-wrote the script with Jason Reitman, reflects on the callous desire to permanently release the ghosts all seem paradoxically delegated to the film’s fan base which seemed to wonder if it was time for its most ‘Ghostbusting’ traditionalist member Bill Murray to retire his famous parapsychologist Peter Venkman from the series where his heart isn’t even slightly present.
According to “Afterlife”, Egon Spengler’s estranged daughter is a single mother living with her teenage kids – Callie (portrayed by Carrie Coon) with her son, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and daughter, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace).
The family made the long and arduous journey to defeat his killer, Gozer the Gozerian, a Sumerian god, thanks in part to a high school physics teacher named Gary Paul Rudd’s character, a group of young friends Lucky Celeste O’Connor Knight and Podcast Logan Kim Yes, Podcast, and the Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Ray Stantz Dan Aykroyd, Winston Zeddemore Ernie Hudson, Dr. Venkman Murray, and the ever-present secretary Janine Annie Potts who is always there to remind you of the 80’s.
Recently, the Oklahomies (yes, even unrelated children!) have moved to New York City to shoot inside Manhattan with the Ectobike, that vintage hearse whose favourite pastime of hers was to chase wild ghosts with harpoons in the speed of the Arnold W.
Now in New York the group comes across antique specialists Patton Oswalt, a nutty paranormal architect James Acaster who makes his Hollywood debut and kumail Nanjiani a con who somehow gets possession of a bouchara-like sphere cryptogram that has something horrifying trapped within it that is very unhappy there and wants to come out and give the chills even those that are fatal-the idea could work if it did not mean that what you are watching was a Roland Emmerich movie.
My fingers have become so lazy they go no further than the most basic of typing. Yet “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” is a well-mixed patch of gibberish that is fun – an epic circus that begins with the legendary poetry of Robert Frost and ends in the vocoder explosion of Ray Parker Jr. Each vignette earns chuckles.
When the scenes are put together, yes they do work but only very fuzzy, as if it were a rough sketch of a very nicely painted picture; Characters come and go at essential plot points, then appear rather unexpectedly with slime on them. A demon enters a vape shop. Once, I could swear someone cut of the firehouse pole may clean. A little bit later it somehow reappeared where it had been.
And the subplots are so gauzy and intangible that you’re not sure if they’re real. Is she going to make a pass on a pretty 15-year-old ghost, played by Emily Alyn Lind? What was that about, is Callie dating Gary or was that just a fist bump in celebration of the time they rode demon dogs together? What about Trevor’s arc, does it just revolve around him wanting to drive the Ectomobile and nothing else? Only wondering, Grace as Dr Spengler’s nerdy granddaughter does most of the engineering work.
Book her in any action film – she is utterly believable when playing Phoebe – a goggly gothic child genius – no Emmie Ross from wherever . In glimpses of the series, it might be difficult to comprehend how her character would carry the entire series of the convoluted made for kids take on the ‘Conjuring’ franchise with a growing interest of new ghost stories from Phoebe whilst exploring a child like interest in the stillness beyond life.
That could have happened, considering the response of the people if the franchise wasn’t tarnished by the social media wars raging in the backdrop of the 2016 all female reimagining (which does not exist in this timeline). But it also looks like this film does not want to go away from the footage – the particle streams, the library of New York Public library, Slimer and Murray letting fascists rattle their chains.
Well, at least they give a twist and are able to work out that in a sense that would make us laugh. Like how the teeny weeny Spawnpm Puff too many marshmallows torches the other babies with cigarette lighters or how Paul Rudd sings out the Ghostbusters theme in the most passionately normal way and as if he is trying to prove to his therapist that busting makes him feel good.
Both Kenan and Reitman appear to be fine that the primary target audience is thirty plus. Then again, whopr more violent possesses a Discman that has a wicked Spin Doctors CD where there is no muscle and anger in Action. But the sentiment always works even better when it is the reckless one – no not the symbols – that shaped 1980s comedies.
The family seems to have this benigno incuriosity towards one another which is new-fangled. This is the cute phase when parents used to joke when kids begin getting inked. And Kenan very elegantly eases the intensity, switches between earsplitting shrillness and spine-chilling stillness.
There was simply nothing and rather `everything’ – in that peculiar warm-bath-of-ectoplasm kind of feeling, that by the time things wound up to the all too familiar happenings of huddled Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, I was already a little annoyed at having tried to reason out the ducks, which only brought us closer to the inevitable. Lets put the ghost of Benjamin Franklin aside for a moment so he doesn’t get offended, the only things certain in life are death and proton packs.
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- Genre: Comedy
- Country: United States
- Director: Gil Kenan
- Cast: Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard
