2024's Best of the Worst: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Bustin makes me feel depressed.

Ghostbusters came out in 1984 when I was eight years old. I was the perfect age to not just like but love the movie. It was co-written and starred Dan Aykroyd, one of my favorite actors, along with other favorites Bill Murray and Harold Ramis.

I liked Ghostbusters for what it was—a mostly enjoyable, sloppy action comedy with a number of iconic elements and characters—but I did not see it as a sacred text.

It wasn’t just a movie; it was a movie about busting ghosts that became important to people of my generation not because of its quality or lack thereof but because they saw it in a pre-critical area. These backward-looking souls were somehow not discouraged by the worldwide sigh of disappointment that greeted 1989’s Ghostbusters II.

It didn’t matter to them that Ghostbusters II was a quintessential arbitrary sequel that was willed into existence by commerce rather than inspiration.

These sad little man-babies didn’t just want more sloppy apparition-based action comedy: they angrily demanded it as if it were their inalienable birthright and not a film series they revered when they were ten years old, mainly because they fell in love with it as children.

The “masses,” as I will ironically and mockingly call them, didn’t just want more Ghostbusters; they wanted more of the Ghostbusters that they grew up with and loved, that they saw as the real Ghostbusters, and not just because the show’s boob tube cartoon incarnation was titled The Real Ghostbusters to differentiate it from The Ghostbusters, an opportunistic TV revival of a live-action kid’s show that, luckily for the parasitic ghouls at Filmation, happened to have a title and premise guaranteed to appeal to kids too young to remember its single season on the air.

These “fans” would not let the franchise die a natural death even after co-screenwriter/co-star Harold Ramis died in 2014.

Plans for a sequel should have died with Ramis. They did not. The cast and crew of Ghostbusters moved on to other things. Its fans did not.

In 2016, the Ghostbusters returned in a way that enraged rather than delighted its core demographic of entitled, emotionally stunted, change-averse, overgrown children. Paul Feig and his Bridesmaids’ leading ladies, Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy, reunited for a female-led reboot that had the internet going nuts, and not in a good way.

Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, and Dan Aykroyd all appeared in the 2016 Ghostbusters,sometimes known as Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, to lend their official stamp of approval, but they were notably playing different characters than the ones they did in Ghostbusters.

This would not do. A sad aggregation of lost souls didn’t want their heroes to play second fiddle to some mouthy broads obnoxiously invading the exclusively male realm of ghost-busting.

Then Jason Reitman, whose dad directed Ghostbusters and, to a lesser extent, Ghostbusters 2, announced that they were going to make a new Ghostbuster movie that would “Hand the movie back to the fans.”

The implication was clear: in 2016, scandalous females took the most important franchise in the history of the universe and shamefully hid it away inside their collective vagina.

It fell upon Jason Reitman, a successful filmmaker whose dad, in a crazy twist, was also a successful filmmaker (how often does that happen, except constantly?) to yank the franchise out of the 2016 cast’s lady parts and give it back to the fans who have been holding their breath in anticipation of an ancient, undoubtedly stoned and completely checked-out Bill Murray returning to a role he feels ambivalently about at best in exchange for a huge amount of money for what appears to be a week of shooting at most.

I have terrible news for old-school Ghostbusters fans. They got what they wanted. And it fucking sucks. Actually, that’s not fair. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is way too bland and forgettable to suck properly.

I probably would not have seen Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire except that I wrote a piece for my new freelance outlet, Wealth of Geeks, and I have a nine-year-old son who loves movies.

So I paid extra for Regal’s RPX experience and saw Frozen Empire in the theater with my boy.

RPX is a dumb, silly gimmick where Regal charges you extra for a bigger screen and sound so loud that you can feel it rumbling during particularly action-packed scenes.

It’s telling that the theater rumbled a little at the start and at the end but otherwise sat there bored for two tedious hours, waiting patiently for big set pieces that never arrived.

At the risk of anthropomorphizing a cinematic format, the RPX system seemed as thoroughly underwhelmed as I was.

The two big problems with Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is that for an action-comedy, it is woefully devoid of action and comedy. It IS, however, sincere and earnest in a way that feels sad rather than honest.

Ghostbusters had the advantage of four lead characters who all had very clear-cut personas rooted in their work on television and film. Except for Ernie Hudson. Boy, they really fucked him when they realized they wouldn’t be getting Eddie Murphy for the role and had to settle for a fantastic character actor several thousand times less famous than Murphy.

The same was true of the 2016 reboot. Whether you love her or hate her, no one can accuse Mellissa McCarthy of not having a clear-cut persona. And Kate McKinnon. She’s great, and Ghostbusters would have been her big star-making role if it had not been for misogyny.

I had a hard time keeping the new Ghostbusters Jr. apart, I’m afriad. I vaguely recall one being in Stranger Things, and the girl playing Egon Spengler’s granddaughter has his glasses, but otherwise, the Ghostbuster’s new junior department left me cold.

These new Busters are overseen by Carrie Coon’s Callie Spengler and Paul Rudd’s Gary Grooberson. If you’d told a fifteen-year-old Paul Rudd in 1984 that forty years later, the Ghostbusters would return with him in a lead role, he’d probably be psyched. If you told him that the film would be so thoroughly meh and utterly devoid of inspiration and life that not even a performer of his magnitude would be able to make an impression, he’d be less enthused.

There’s a moment deep into the film when Rudd’s character talk-sings the Ghostbuster theme song to Callie. It’s simultaneously his apex and nadir. It’s the apex because it actually feels like Rudd has wiggled free from a lifeless script and found a way to invest some of himself and his personality into the proceedings. It’s a nadir because I love Paul Rudd and the Ghostbusters theme song, and I rolled my eyes in annoyance at such shameless pandering.

Patton Oswalt and Kumail Nanjani are highlights because they’re the only cast members who seem excited to be there.

Now I remember that one of the kids named Podcast because he has a podcast, which makes me angry. Ironically, there are female Ghostbusters this time around, but they haven’t offended the delicate sensibilities of fans by having strong personalities.

New Busters Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky Domingo (Celeste O’Connor) work with Dan Aykroyd’s Raymond Stantz and Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddemore on Ghostbusters stuff.

I am currently deep into watching and writing about the second season of Saturday Night Live for my Every Episode Ever project at Buttondown. I am struck by the massive disconnect between the razor-sharp, machine-gun fast virtuoso who tore through the venerable sketch comedy institution’s iconic first few years like an autistic tornado and the slow, well-fed, complacent Aykroyd of Frozen Empire.

Much of that is attributable to age. Aykroyd had all the energy, talent, youth, ambition and drive in the world when he debuted on Saturday Night Live while barely old enough to drive legally. The Aykroyd of Frozen Empire seems concerned only with protecting the legacy of the characters he created in the most boring, tame, predictable manner possible.

Aykroyd is a Robin Williams-on-coke exemplar of manic intensity compared to Bill Murray, who shows up briefly to collect a gaudy paycheck and ensure that this sequel is legitimately legit in a meaningless way.

Speaking of meaningless returns, the Stay Puft Marshmallow man is back—and he’s tiny! There are a whole bunch of Stay Puft Marshmallow men who are all cute, toyetic, and whatnot.

AND William Atherton is back! One of the preeminent bad guys of the Reagan era has returned, and boy, oh boy, does he look exhausted and dispirited. I’m not talking about his character but about Atherton himself. Honestly, doing a dinner theater version of The Fantasticks would be more dignified than resurrecting his heavy here.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire doesn’t ultimately even feel like a movie. Instead, it feels like an underwhelming pilot for an HBO Max Ghostbusters limited series.

I became violently ill upon leaving Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. I vomited profusely, and while I don’t think there is a cause-and-effect relationship between watching the movie and enthusiastically blowing chunks, I’m not entirely sure that Frozen Empire didn’t make me physically ill through sheer suckiness.

I did not care for this film.

One star out of Five