Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire review: A serviceable franchise entry that tugs on '80s nostalgia

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire opens with what’s meant to be a thrilling car-chase ride through lower Manhattan, where we get to see the new Ghostbusters—that’d be the Spengler family (plus Gary!)—in action. Mom, boyfriend, and kids (one now 18, he’ll have you know) are clearly settling in just fine in New York City. They’ve taken over the old fire station that used to house those old Ghostbusters. And in that frenetic first scene, where they all band together to trap a Hell’s Kitchen sewer dragon, we are invited to see how the old has become new again. It’s the old firehouse and the old Ectomobile, but this is a brand new team in a New York City that, actually, feels not that different from the kind Spengler Sr. and his crew roamed in the 1980s. Therein lies the appeal, however limited, of Gil Kenan’s latest franchise entry: it’s gone back to basics—it’s playing the hits!—with only a sprinkling of new or modern or even fresh energy.

The Hell’s Kitchen sewer dragon fiasco, which finds the Ghostbusters having heavily damaged city property sets up an intriguing new wrinkle in Ghostbusters lore: no longer will New Yorkers be left to wonder who they’re gonna call when things get weird, but as bureaucrat-turned-mayor Walter Peck (William Atherton) puts it, they’re now left to wonder who’s gonna pay for all the physical havoc they’re wreaking. Scolded by Peck, then, Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon, a welcome vision on screen, as ever) is forced to admit that working with her 15-year-old daughter Phoebe (McKenna Grace, the beating heart of the film) may not be the wisest of choices she’s making these days. Best the teenager leave the ghostbusting to her, Gary (Paul Rudd, arguably playing the most Paul Rudd character that ever Paul Rudded), and her older brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard, who intermittently disappears from the film entirely for no discernible reason).

Phoebe is not known for taking such talking-tos seriously. She’s incensed that despite being such a natural ghostbuster she’ll now be sidelined, unable to follow with what she believes is her birthright. Thankfully, a wildly ridiculous plot involving a chess-playing ghost (Emily Alyn Lind), a huckster whose family history may have primed him for grander things (Kumail Nanjiani), and the arrival of a curious orb containing what may be an ancient evil ready to put all of New York City into freezing peril, will give Phoebe plenty to reasons to keep donning the Ghostbusters uniform and hoisting the proton pack she so adores.

If you’re wondering how the original Ghostbusters factor into this narrative, worry not. Jason Reitman and Kenan have deftly found ways of folding the likes of Dr. Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Dr. Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson)—and yes, even Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) into the lives of the Spenglers—who happily left their lives in Oklahoma behind to return the franchise to its Big Apple roots. It is Ray who first comes across the metal orb that becomes key to Frozen Empire’s story (dating as it does to pre-Sumerian civilizations); he’s turned his interest in the supernatural into a fanciful side hustle wherein he acquires objects with high psychic energy (i.e. haunted objects) into a web series that may be the film’s one nod to this story taking place in 2024. Those objects, in turn, help Winston with his newfangled Paranormal Research Center where, ideally, all the ghosts who are now clogging up the fire station’s ghost-storage containment unit will be transferred. Which is good, since unexplainable cracks have begun to suggest that the 40-year-old contraption may have reached capacity. (Try not to see any kind of metaphor in that premise, I dare you).

All these various plots (know that Trevor has several run-ins with everyone’s favorite green slimy ghost and tiny marshmallow men continue to be cute if facile joke gag props throughout) are threaded together quite effortlessly—even if, laid out this way, there’s an unavoidable sense that there are way too many characters to juggle here. It explains why Phoebe ends up being the only one with a discernible arc and a grounded sense of characterization. Elsewhere, the OG Ghostbusters play well by harkening back to their heyday in short, bite-sized ready spurts, while the new ones get to play just one note each so as to keep the “world might end if this evil spirit is not stopped” plot from plodding through to its natural CGI-heavy (though artfully deployed) conclusion.

Like both Reitmans before him, Kenan keeps the film’s tone in that sweet spot between playful and thrilling. Inventive set pieces at the New York Public Library (involving a trash bag, of all things!) break up more science-heavy exposition scenes (not to mention carefully curated Easter egg-riddled moments designed to get OG fans chuckling to themselves). And while I’ll continue to wonder what it is Carrie Coon is doing in a franchise film like this one, reduced as she is to being as “mom” a character as you’re likely to find in movies like these, she and the rest of the cast do an agreeable job of keeping the jokes and the ghost-busting antics afloat.

Overall, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire makes for a serviceable entry in this now four-decade-running franchise. No matter that, in tone and in structure, it all but replicates what’s worked in the past. After the box office miss (and troll-laden critical beating) that greeted Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters back in 2016, this series shows no signs of reinventing the wheel. Nor does it find any reason to. There are ghosts that are in need of being busted. There’s an existential threat that’s in dire need of being averted. You can probably figure out what’s bound to happen in the film’s frosty, climactic battle. And yes, it may well include the earworm of a song that’s become a de facto anthem of these films. But at least there’s an amiable time to be had in between. And an albeit pat message about working as a team, or maybe as a family, being laundered in there somehow. Brisk and efficient perhaps to a fault, Frozen Empire feels perfectly pitched to set up as many Xeroxed sequels the creators wish to conjure.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire arrives in theaters March 22