Film review: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Following on from 2021’s Afterlife reboot, the Spengler family have moved from Oklahoma to New York, to the original Ghostbusters firehouse which has been bequeathed to them by ex-’Buster-turned-philanthropist Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson). Having caused mayhem while trying to capture a sewer dragon, they’re put on a final warning by Mayor Walter Peck (William Atherton), and precocious, nerdy Ghostbusting natural Phoebe Spengler (McKenna Grace) is singled out for being too young to be employed as a Ghostbuster anyway. Dejected, she befriends the ghost of a girl who died in a fire along with her family, Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), and unloads her loneliness and family angst onto her.

Meanwhile, ex-Ghostbuster Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) comes into receipt of a mysterious orb, via a customer hawking his grandma’s old stuff to his occult shop. It turns out to be imprisoning an ancient god with the power to freeze the Earth. When he’s unleashed, the Ghostbusters have to stop him – hard when he can freeze and smash the very beams from their proton packs.

As a set-up, it’s a good start. And the actual start is good, too – firefighters on a horse and trap rushing from the firehouse 100 years ago to answer a call from an explorer’s society, only to find no fire, instead entering a room in which the inhabitants have suddenly been frozen solid. Ditto the twist when the demon is released and for a moment things take a genuinely sinister turn. The problem is it doesn’t know how to build on the premise or tell the story in any way that pulls you in, with any consistent pace, or proper sense of excitement and tension.

Instead, it drops in a million references to the original, without actually using them in any meaningful or smart way. The firehouse is infested with miniature Stay-Puft Marshmallow Men, apparently just so they could have a cute sequence of them lolling about like fat little kittens. Ray encounters the ghost in the library again, with no link to anything else, like nodding at someone you went to school with at a traffic light then going about your day. Oh look, here’s Slimer, just in the attic under a pile of garbage who keeps covering Finn Wolfhard in goo. And look here, it’s Bill Murray as Peter Venkman, little more than a walk-on, phoning it in so lazily you imagine his remuneration will come from Verizon, rather than the producers. Annie Potts’ return as brassy New Yorker receptionist Janine Melnitz is potentially great, but completely underused.