By Nicholas Vermaaten, Contributor

[Sony Pictures; 2024]

Rating: 5/10

Bustin Makes Me Feel Mediocre!

The corpse of the Ghostbusters franchise has once again been pulled from its grave to nostalgically dance around the cinema. However, what surprised me about this most recent dance, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, was that it wasn’t entirely horrible. Yet, for every aspect of Frozen Empire I found to be fun or interesting, there were an equal number of things that were either distracting or just terrible, creating a cinematic experience that will probably be entirely forgotten by the time the next episode of the “Ghostbusting saga” comes to theaters.

Picking up three years after the previous installment, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire follows the Spangler family as they attempt to resurrect their father’s ghost-exterminating business 40 years after the original film.

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If there is one thing I wholly like about this film, it would be its visuals. While the film’s cinematography isn’t Oscar-worthy, the presentation has a consistent style, appropriately heightened in moments of fear or tension. The film often puts characters in dark voids to portray this fear, and while I’ve seen this effect before, it works quite well in Frozen Empire.

There is an attempt to channel the comedic and pseudo-scientific energy of the original film through ample use of jokes and ghost-tech lingo. On occasion, these attempts at levity and sci-fi worldbuilding are appreciated. However, moments where these subjects are used in new and interesting ways are few and far between. Where in the original film the cynical use of comedy and janky equipment poked fun at Reagan-era capitalism or generated characterization, in Frozen Empire, the jokes and equipment are frequently only meant to create a nostalgic response from the audience, one which was wearing thin with me the longer the film went on.

The film’s story is mostly fine… if awkwardly told. It’s a very Marvel-esque story where a hither-too-unknown villain threatens the world of the film, forcing all the characters to come together to push against the antagonist’s plans of global domination. It’s a stock narrative but has worked decently in other films of this type, but what complicates things is the order in which scenes are presented. 

Moments that would have made sense at the film’s beginning are shown in its last 15 minutes, and scenes that would have worked as build-up are presented as payoff. It’s an odd issue, one I haven’t seen in a big-budget franchise film before. It makes it feel like we’ve barely spent time with these characters despite the film’s nearly two-hour runtime and how many of these characters have well-defined arcs. I really do think that had the film’s script had another draft, these narrative issues could have been easily cleared up, but instead, the product we’re left with feels slapdash.

But that’s what this film is: a product. One which will be replaced in a few years when the next Ghostbusters film comes out. The age of nostalgia is far from over, and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is yet another unfortunate reminder of this.