Franchise Watch: Ghostbusters - The Frozen Empire (2024)

Watched:  07/23/2024

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jason Reitman

The expansion of a good movie or two into sprawling franchises makes for a curious environment as we have been seeing again and again and again - especially as we resurrect decades old concepts.  In the mid 2010's, because everyone else had franchises popping, it seems Columbia looked at their catalog of perennial favorites that could possibly withstand transformation into a franchise and came up with the 2016 Ghostbusters, which - at best - enjoys lukewarm and damning praise of "well, it's kind of funny" from it's defenders. 

No matter where you landed on that movie, it failed to meet Sony/ Columbia's financial expectations, and - with no path forward for those characters and Jason Reitman in the wings, Sony immediately greenlit an un-reboot, and put out Ghostbusters: Afterlife - dropping it squarely in the middle of the pandemic shutdown.  

The movie meant only the most ardent fans would go see it, pulling in only $204 million.  I have no idea what the studio's expectations were but we weren't quite done thinking a franchise film should make $800 million or more at the time.  Here in 2024, I think getting more than $5 and some pocket lint is considered a win.  

To maybe set the tone, and give people a chance to opt out of the rest of this post, I'll put my cards on the table: I deeply did not like Ghostbusters: Afterlife.  I am not even sure I'd describe it as a competently made movie.  Not that there are exactly *technical gaffes* like boom mics falling into frame, but from a "what is Ghostbusters, and are we delivering something that fosters the multi-decade enthusiasm for at least that one movie?" 

I think... it kind of sucked.  

Undaunted, and with the promise of action figure sales, Columbia made a follow up.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) is, perhaps, as bad or worse for many of the same reasons, but also finding all new ways to make me not want to watch any more of these movies.  

So now is your chance to run away, fair reader.  Because here we go.

Like a high schooler looking to borrow some legitimacy for their essay, this movie starts with a Robert Frost poem.  Which may be the funniest part of the whole movie.  

This is how dull this movie is:  the movie had so little in the way of interesting stuff in it, the trailers basically showed things that occur after an hour into the movie as the big sell.  Sure, there's little micro-second clips of other things in the trailer, but the "this is what you'll see" is not the turn into the second act - it's post turn-to-the-third-act visuals. 

The OG Ghostbusters is a zany comedy about three hapless university-types who are very good at a few things and very bad at other things.  And, risking Ray's financial solvency, they go into business with the preposterous notion that they will become exterminators for your ghost problem.  It's three (and then four) guys who are genuinely funny comedic actors on their own, bouncing off the equally hilarious Rick Moranis, and treating a lovely Sigourney Weaver like Margret Dumont and with New York and New Yorkers as supporting players.

Just when you think things can't get goofier, an ancient Sumerian demon-god takes the shape of a marshmallow company mascot and rampages like Godzilla through Manhattan.  It is one of the greatest gags in film.

The set up of ghost busting is there for jokes to be delivered by some bright young comic actors.  They are funny people facing a series of funny problems.  It is a comedy - and maybe one of the best in a decade that produced fantastic, enduring films.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is about a large number of people, half of whom seem miserable.  The movie focuses on an unfunny kid with a shocking minimum of dialog for a central character.  Together, the heroes, by their own hand, set loose a possibly planet-wide cataclysmic event via their humorless selfishness and incompetence.  They then get called heroes after fixing the problem they caused in a sequence that is CGI, but looks like a 1980's animatronic that can't move very well.  It threatens to kill them but does not.  For reasons.

I wish I could say that I thought there was just one thing wrong with the movie and therefore it wasn't for me, and I could wander off and we'd all be happy.  It does have a few major things I think are just choices the movie makes, but it's death by a million cuts.  Some of which I will outline below.

Yes.  There are entirely too many characters.  I have no idea why Finn Wolfhard and his ladyfriend from the prior movie are here as the movie has no idea what to do with them.  I don't know what the blonde maybe British guy is bringing to the table.  I don't know why Slimer is here (except people want to say "that's Slimer!" to their kids).  I don't know why Annie Potts or Venkman are here.  I am only vaguely aware of why Carrie Coons is here - but I hope she is enjoying her paycheck for playing someone who manages to look disinterested in every frame of the movie.

The plot is almost self-defeating by having Winston there as a millionaire bank-rolling the Spenglers - are they a fee-for-service company or a ghost-vigilante group?  What are they even doing?  It's never explained.  Nor is it explained why we're keeping the R&D division a secret.  Or why Manhattan hasn't come for them with pitchforks after they tore up midtown - apparently not a new experience.  What's crazy is - all of that is rife for comedy, but instead it's just a flatline of a mood and plot holes.

This movie is long, it's very badly structured, and, because nothing happening is funny, it is largely boring.  I do not buy the 19th Century ghost girl with influencer voice.  Or the villain's plan was as Rube Goldberg as it is - relying on things it couldn't possibly know or probably understand, -like futuristic technology and anticipating Phoebe having a bad week.  It's painful to watch Paul Rudd do his Paul Rudd thing trying to save the movie from itself and Patton Oswalt improvising his way to the film's solitary laugh before vanishing again.  

I would have given my left arm to see Oswalt in a jumpsuit over the rest of the crew by the end of the movie.  He seems to get what the tone could be literally better than anyone.

The second you see Gaslight Ghost flick her match, you have an idea she's going to be the key to the conflict's resolution, because we've been pre-set with the Robert Frost poem about fire and ice.  Add in the return of Nanjiani partway through the movie where you know this is no longer a cameo, and you realize:  oh, shit.  The Ghostbusters aren't going to do dick.  It's going to be this ghost, Kumail and the little girl.  So then you just have to wait for that to happen some considerable amount of time later.

There's just so many characters, I don't know what they were doing or why.  It feels like they had a 7 episode TV series written and were told it needed to be a movie, and rather than get economical, they just cut it down to the bare plot points to get from A-to-Z.  And when you do that, it's hard to care about anything happening or any of the characters.

You know, I know you're wanting to swarm the comments and tell me:

• This movie isn't the old movies, this is a franchise for the NEW generation!  You're old!  It's for THE KIDS
• Well, Columbia wants their Avengers franchise
• This is more in line with the cartoon that people watched and loved

To point one:  One - I assume the studio wants my money as the person of the generation who saw the originals in the theater, as these movies are a nostalgia fest.  But...

Two - Do kids now hate comedy?  Is comedy too mid?  Is it too cringe?  What is it about Ghostbusters 1 and 2 that makes us think kids would hate to laugh at those things and, instead want to watch a dour kid pout for an hour?  

Tbh:  Phoebe sucks in this movie, and I blame the writing and plot, not the actor.  (in case you missed it - Phoebe almost kills everyone on the planet through multiple missteps before "saving the day" by not telling everyone else to put brass on their proton pack and basically lying to everyone when she doesn't get her way).

Even Kumail Nanjiani seems like he's struggling in the context of this movie, and he's a funny guy.  But he's working with what he was given.

We're in an amazing age for comedy.  There are so many funny people on television, with so many styles of comedy.  And it's like Ghost Corps (the name of the weird, inside Columbia production company making these) is afraid to go and ask the Lonely Island guys what their Ghostbusters would look like.  What does this look like with John Mulaney and Nick Kroll starting a franchise in Cleveland?  Awkwafina?  Jessica Williams?  Would it be so bad to see Nate Bargatze try to catch a ghost?  Natasha Leggero? Heck, I think Ayo Edebiri would kill it.

Heck, Oswalt, Rudd and Nanjiani would have been an interesting trio, especially with Carrie Coon as a Dana-type.

Handing over a franchise to the kids doesn't mean automatically giving up the notion that this is a comedy.  But here we are.  Making the movie *about* kids just seems like a misguided bit of marketing driving the cart.

I also think we should be super clear:  the first movies weren't made for kids.  It was the 1980s, so kids saw them, but they were aimed at a young adult and teen audience in an era where kids smoked and the drinking age was 18. 

To point two:  Of course Sony wants a franchise.  This isn't new.  They wanted a franchise in the 1990's and the original team took a pass after knowing the second one barely worked because there's a kind of limited number of stories you can do and jokes you can recycle.  

But comedies can be franchises for good or ill.  We have something like 7 Police Academy movies, 3 Naked Gun films, and I saw a Despicable Me movie the afternoon before watching this.  

To point three:  I don't know what to tell you.  I never saw the cartoon beyond an episode or two.  I'm sure that cartoon was very good.  But I think it's about as relevant to Ghostbusters as a movie as the RoboCop and Rambo cartoons were to those movies.  

I know that the show was a touchstone to many Ghostbuster fanboys' childhoods.  I just don't think it's super relevant - except that a few folks online have compared this ghost to the ghosts on the show.  So.  Fine.  He gets about the same two minutes of screentime that those ghosts got on a 20 minute kids cartoon, but in a 3 hour movie.  I don't think that helped anything.

Look, like everyone else, I watch franchise movies, often hoping for the best.  I, too, want to experience the joy that came with repeated viewings of the original film or films.  But I think after four follow up films to the one I liked, I'm calling it a day on this concept.

This movie is a mess.  Somehow it's more of a mess than the previous movie, which was all over the place.  

I think Jason Reitman is just too close to this stuff for his own good, and director Gil Kenan doesn't have the sensibility for the kind of comedy that made the first movie(s) sing.  There aren't even jokes or bits - there's, like, references to jokes from a 40-year-old movie in the place of jokes.  There's sort of set up and then wanly delivered follow ups that aren't really gags or punchlines.  It's "joke shaped objects" masquerading as comedy.  

Reitman has his Ghostbusters living in a New York devoid of anyone but the characters we're talking to directly - forgetting that the comedy is how these people interact with the world.  What does it look like when the Ghostbusters show up at a hotel?  Or try to explain what they're doing to their fellow inmates?  But this Ghostbusters is them living in a depopulated New York where there aren't people, there are sims to be driven past.

What did it look like when the Spenglers got their first call?  Why don't we see them trying on uniforms?  Recording an ad?  Responding to crank calls?  

the value proposition of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

But, okay, I'll accept that Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is not a comedy.  It's a serious drama.  I've certainly been told these are action movies with comedic elements (which is a confusing read to me at best). 

If it's that, the movie now has to be reviewed as a drama.  And with a flimsy plot and weak characters, it fares worse.  What is Carrie Coon playing?  Why is Finn Wolfhard in this movie?  Explain to me Podcast and Lucky and the Minions Staypufts.  Why would Walter Peck seize and melt down the ghostbusting equipment when he had THE front row seat to how wrong he was about ghosts?  What is the villain's plan and how does he achieve it?  What is Ray doing and why isn't he working for Winston?  

Even as a drama we're now in this oddball space where we're still referencing movies from decades prior as the only meat on the bone. 

In the OG film, it doesn't matter what Gozer wants, because what Gozer wants is a joke.  He's a big, terrible Sumerian demon-god who is so awful it's funny.  It's nonsense for Ray to spew as the weirdo ghost-fan who finally gets to put his knowledge to use.  In this movie, we're given a neat history of our ice guy by way of visuals somewhere between Moana and Shang-Chi in that new way we show backstory via carvings or art.  But what the guys has been doing for 2000 years or what he'll do now is sort of unclear.

If our primary story is "this poor girl cannot do exactly the thing she wants to do because of federal, state and local labor laws and child endangerment rules" then...  I'm checking out.  Our secondary story is - some nameless Big Bad is going to come and do us dirty, but there's not much in the way of a build to that Big Bad boss-fight (see: demon dogs, possessed Dana, etc... in the first movie).  Here we have...  gaslight ghost girl and a trash bag.

In a comedy, I forgive goofy flaws because I expect the movie to be in service to the greater good of a good chuckle.  But once you decide you're an adventure movie, now you're about your plot.  And this movie doesn't know how to be either.

Anyway, I'm done talking about the movie itself.

This is a movie designed by studio rubric to make sure it has one reference every seven minutes, doesn't cheese-off middle-aged Ghostbusters fans who want the original movies to count, to look like Harry Potter with a gifted special child who is a chosen one (but we'll never use those words), and take itself seriously so that no one makes fun of us for liking a thing.  

Don't worry about ChatGPT taking jobs, we have studio execs and data points to tell us how to make a fan-pleasing movie already.

What I will say is that whatever people saw in the trailer clearly made people decide to wait for streaming, because this movie had worse box office than the one released when we were afraid we'd die going to the movies, coming in at just about $200 million.  

I don't want to get too much into the fandom around Ghostbusters, but I think it's fair to say that what they want and what I care about in the first two movies are very different things.  And I kind of wonder why "bored melancholy" is the vibe they're rewarding with an 83% Audience Rating on RT.