Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire – Review

“GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE”

Frozen Empire is the sequel to Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and if you’ve seen that movie, you’ll want to check this one out. I personally liked Afterlife, and even though it wasn’t an amazing movie, I thought that it had some good ideas, it’s also one of the few times that using CGI to resurrect a dead celebrity didn’t feel completely creepy or invasive. 

Frozen Empire does move out of the Oklahoma setting of Afterlife and brings the story back to New York, it also brings back virtually every surviving cast member from the original films, and adds a few new ones as well, like Kumail Nanjiani and British comedian James Acaster. 

It’s a basic plot which mainly centres around an artefact that will release an extremely powerful spirit that intends to freeze over New York. If you are coming into this film to witness iced-out New York, that takes an incredibly long time to actually happen, so it’s weird that the actual Frozen Empire isn’t a big part of the movie…

I’ll stress that much like Afterlife; this one definitely feels like it’s kept the spirit of the original movie. There are some genuinely funny moments in it, the cast does very well for the most part, but it surprised me that Bill Murray is barely in this movie- he’s one of the original Ghostbusters that gets the least amount of screen time! I don’t know if it was a scheduling conflict or if he simply didn’t want to be a big part of it, but it surprised me since Ernie Hudson and Dan Aykroyd play a big part. 

I liked the fact that this kept the aesthetic of classic Ghostbusters by moving it back into New York, but the Stranger Things influence is still there in the tone and with the actual Stranger Things cast members in it. 

There are some funny lines in the film, but that being said, I don’t think that Frozen Empire is an extraordinary movie, it’s very by the numbers. I’ll even say it feels quite condensed. That’s not to suggest that there was much left on the cutting room floor, but it certainly felt like a lot of plot points just happened, with not an incredible amount of build-up to them.

If I’m honest, I realised while watching a similar thing I felt when I watched the newest Men In Black movie: there’s not much to get out of this franchise. I noticed a lot of repeating plot points in this film, so that’s why I feel like if this was the last Ghostbusters movie, the series would at least be going out on a high.