What follows is a cynical, marginally cathartic, passionately dispassionate, and regrettably scathing takedown of alleged film Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and the parameters that allowed it to get made, brought to you by about a half-hour-long, somewhat existential rumination, an empty-handed grasp for positives, and a series of far more deep breaths than I care to admit.
Let’s face it, there is no one on this planet who will walk into this movie expecting anything more than by-the-numbers franchise fare; this is a movie for people who have either made Ghostbusters a part of their personality, are looking to waste (not spend, not kill; waste) about two hours, or — and this is the demographic I predict will make up the majority of this film’s box office — groups of friends and families that are so hopelessly entrenched in the plastic, consumerist hell that we’re all navigating, that they’ll gravitate towards whatever neuron-neutering piece of content is offered up to them in a tragically desperate attempt to have a good time. And make no mistake, many will believe they did have a good time because they have to believe that at this point.
That is precisely the ceiling that Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire set for itself, and the only thing more infuriating about it being okay with its goalposts is the sheer anti-inspiration that fueled its inability to even touch that ceiling.
Now, the word “Ghostbusters” tells you all you need to know about the spine of the plot; the Afterlife gang is all back together, and they need to bust some ghosts before the world ends. And to be honest, I’m not even sure what else there is to say about the plot; textually, Frozen Empire is such an inconsequential nothing-burger that I struggle to even call it a story. It’s not even that it’s a bad plot, because that would require some indication that it’s trying to have a plot in the first place; it’s not, and that’s much, much worse.
Instead, Frozen Empire puts on a blindfold and proceeds to try and stitch together a series of incoherent, quarter-baked ideas with several heaping tablespoons of nostalgia courtesy of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Slimer, and even footage from the original Ghostbusters movies; therein lies Exhibit A of the creative no-man’s-land that is the state of this franchise.
Exhibit B would have to be the fact that Frozen Empire seems to have made a life mission out of insulting the audience whenever possible. There is no quicker way to lose a viewer’s respect than to have Paul Rudd say “Hey! That was pretty funny!” after Phoebe tells a cringey joke, or to have Kumail Nanjiani say “That was awesome!” after telekinetically redirecting the course of a proton pack beam (don’t ask). But Frozen Empire also plays the long game of losing one’s respect by approaching every plot beat with such a shallow, childish pseudo-confidence, that hardly any line of dialogue has any hope of being more than an additional, sanitized, milquetoast nail in the coffin of a film that would probably get an absolute kick out of me having begun this paragraph with “Exhibit B would have to to be…” Get it? Because I made the “B” sound twice in quick succession? Get it? Do you get it?
Furthermore, despite a supremely stacked cast of tried-and-true practitioners of comedic timing, there are maybe five lines in the entire film that are worthy of even a light chuckle. Even then, Frozen Empire is so impossibly committed to drowning itself in its relentless abhorrence for creativity, that even smiling at those lines feels like grasping a sharp rock in the ocean; it’s a completely meaningless interaction, but at least that meaninglessness can be interacted with, even if it wounds you in the long run.
Speaking of said practitioners, someone please get these poor, poor actors better projects after this one. My presumption is that Rudd and company were under no illusion that they were working with some of the worst material out there, and what else can you do at that point other than blindly phone it in and hope that the result at least makes sense in the context of the movie?
The problem there, however, is that the film can’t really claim to have a context of its own, because it exists solely for people who will mindlessly (and that’s key here) flock to anything with “Ghostbusters” in the title, and when a movie exists for any entity before it exists for itself, it’s already committed one of the worst possible sins of the medium by forfeiting its potential identity and, by extension, its ambitions.
And in saying that, I’m quite honestly not even sure if I’m critiquing Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire or if I’m critiquing the specific Hollywood machine that churned out this soulless glut, because they might as well be one in the same. By coating itself in sugary nostalgia, Frozen Empire allows fans the illusion of being seen; “There’s that character I like! I recognize that ghost! I feel like I’m part of something!” And the fact that our current social landscape has left us so grossly detached from one another and ourselves, that someone out there will gladly rely on such shoddily-crafted hyperproducts like Frozen Empire to access even a fraction of an endorphin, is indicative of an entirely evil cycle that the entertainment industry continues to be complicit in with movies like this.
Again, no one expected much from Frozen Empire, and it really didn’t need to do much. It would have also been completely okay if it wanted to try something different from its predecessors; in fact, that’s pretty much the entire point of serialized storytelling in film in the first place. But with Frozen Empire, not only did it barely attempt to reach an effectively rock-bottom ceiling, it couldn’t even be bothered to try the same thing as its predecessors; if doing nothing is a lack of action, then whatever Frozen Empire did is somehow the opposite of action, which is less than doing nothing, and I don’t even know if a word for that exists.
In closing, there’s no real way to talk about Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire without getting caught in a dreary circle of why this dreadful aspect led to that dreadful aspect, and how it all loops back to that first dreadful aspect, until you’re just vaguely reiterating how bad it is. And the thing is, that makes perfect sense, because the film is at once a cyclical product of non-inspiration, and simultaneously the fuel and the excrement of Hollywood’s role in this unsightly consumption cycle that weighs on us day after day. And that distinction, my friends, is the single biggest standout of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire; that should, on some level, make you angry.
