Review: 'Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire' is all callbacks to the franchise's past glories, with little to make it memorable on its own
There are plenty of movies — “The Sixth Sense” and “The Others” come to mind — where the central figures are ghosts who don’t know that they’re dead, which makes me wonder: Can a movie franchise be like that?
Based on the evidence of “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” the franchise started 40 years ago by writers Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis and director Ivan Reitman has passed over into the Great Beyond of moviedom and hasn’t figured it out yet.
This new movie picks up shortly after the events of “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.” Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon) and her kids — Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), now 18, and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), now 15 — have moved to New York and are living in the old firehouse that was the headquarters of the original Ghostbusters. They share the living quarters with Phoebe’s science teacher, Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), who’s now Callie’s boyfriend and awkwardly auditioning for the role of Phoebe and Trevor’s stepdad.
Early on, we get a chase sequence that sets up the family dynamic: Gary’s driving the Ecto-1 through Manhattan streets, Callie’s navigating in the front seat, Trevor’s in back maneuvering a ghost trap on an RC car, and Phoebe’s again in the side gunner seat, shooting her proton pack at whatever phantom they’re after.
After one such chase causes some damage through the streets, our new Ghostbusters team is accosted by another familiar character: Walter Peck (William Atherton). The movie never explains how a meddling EPA inspector — the one who shut down the OG ‘busters in the first movie — managed to convince a majority of New York’s voters to elect him mayor, especially when he’s the same emasculated jerk he always was.
As a result of Peck’s lecturing — and child labor laws — Phoebe gets benched. She’s bummed about this, and finds consolation when she befriends a teen ghost, Melody (Emily Alyn Lind, from “Doctor Sleep”). Meanwhile, Callie and Gary check in with their benefactor, original Ghostbuster Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) and his assistant, Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts), about the stability of the firehouse’s ghost containment unit, which hasn’t been upgraded since Callie’s dad, the late Egon Spengler (Ramis’ character), built it.
Meanwhile — and there’s a lot of “meanwhile” before the script (by director Gil Kenan and the last movie’s director, Jason Reitman) finally kicks into gear — Ackroyd’s Ray Stantz is making paranormal YouTube content with Phoebe’s pal from Oklahoma, Podcast (Logan Kim). Then a stranger, Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani) brings in a mysterious artifact: A brass orb with incredible spectral energy. The orb is taken to Winston’s secret lab, where Trevor’s high-school pal Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) now works.
If it seems like the synopsis above is just a recitation of names of characters from the franchise’s history, you have zeroed in on the movie’s main problem: It’s almost nothing but references. It’s an hour before one major character shows up, and nearly 90 minutes before someone (Patton Oswalt) identifies the movie’s villain.
If one were to strip away the callbacks to Slimer and the walking Statue of Liberty — everything from all the previous films except for the 2016 movie, whose lady Ghostbusters have been memory-holed to appease the “you ruined my childhood” mob — this two-hour movie probably would clock in around 20 minutes.
As happened in “Afterlife,” the most genuine moments of “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” center on Grace’s Phoebe, as she reconciles the perils of adolescence with the responsibility of being heir to her grandfather’s paranormal genius. If this franchise can come back from the dead, it will be because someone lets Phoebe strike out on her own adventures. I know some women Ghostbusters who could give her a hand.
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‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’
★1/2
Opens Friday, March 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for supernatural action/violence, language and suggestive references. Running time: 115 minutes.