Film Review — Ghostbusters Frozen Empire
Bustin’ may make the titular spectre-hunters feel good, but with this sequel, the audience is unlikely to share that sentiment
Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984) didn’t need sequels. There has never been any artistic justification for further instalments of what was, in essence, a one-joke film that oughtn’t to have worked but did. Yet because the original was a box office smash, we’ve since had the tepid Ghostbusters 2 (1989), the largely derided but actually not terrible gender-reversed reboot Ghostbusters (2016), nostalgia porn legacy sequel Ghostbusters Afterlife (2021), and now the utter waste of everyone’s time that is Ghostbusters Frozen Empire.
The kindest thing I can say about Frozen Empire is that it is assembled with a modicum of professional competence. You can hear the dialogue. The visual effects are of an expected standard. The performances are adequate. But the screenplay (by director Gil Kenan and co-writer Jason Reitman) feels as though it’s been written under the influence of alcohol, and akin to those silly stories where someone writes a sentence, then folds the piece of paper, and passes it the next person to write the next sentence. It’s a randomly assembled smattering of Ghostbustery bits and pieces that have been chucked together, resulting…
