“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” is many things, but a comedy isn’t one of them. It’s an effects-slathered fantasy, occasionally funny.
The “Ghostbusters” franchise follows no reason or rhyme, which ordinarily I prefer with my franchises. I mean, yes, of course: Money’s the reason. So far, we’ve had huge-hit “Ghostbusters” followed by a pretty funny, less-of-a-hit sequel , aNow we have “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” in the “Afterlife” vein and a tick better. My beef is simple. “Frozen Empire,” named for its phantom god adversary’s threatened Second Ice Age — “Frozen On Ice” without the songs — does not qualify as a comedy.
This element in director Gil Kenan’s screenplay, co-written with Jason Reitman, works well. And it might’ve come to more if the rest of “Frozen Empire” figured out how to establish and sustain the right comic spirit, instead of shrugging off the jokes. Nostalgia, meanwhile, may be enough to put it over. “Afterlife” alums Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon return, which helps, along with the rest of the Spengler offspring and affiliated young people. The old guard’s back, too: Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Bill Murray, even William Atherton, still sniveling, still determined to condemn the Manhattan firehouse and ghost containment center where the characters played by Coon and Rudd now call home.
The latest threat to Earth arrives in the form of a mystical orb . It’s fun, now and then, to hang out with these characters again, as they cope with domestic issues, city politics, tiny Stay-Puft marshmallow sailors and “The Day After Tomorrow”-sized climate change. But the bombastic digital effects, which audiences have by now been trained to endure in half the movies they see, amounts to just that: stuff. Big, dull, digital stuff.
Just about everybody on screen in “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” lightens the load. But sometime around the eighth or ninth round of expository mumbo jumbo concerning the ectoplasmic nightmare about to happen, the movie starts moving sideways, not forward. Hate to say it, but: hold that ghost, indeed.Click to print Chicago Rat Hole filled in with cement and dug out by devoted fans
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