Bustin’ Makes Me Feel Bleh

Dan Aykroyd and Kumail Nanjiani in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Photo: Jaap Buitendijk/Columbia Pictures

It opens with a Robert Frost poem, for God’s sake. The people who made Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire can’t simply be content to declare victory in their battle to turn a silly comic franchise into something baggy and self-important; no, they have to rub it in, too. That Frost’s immortal poem “Fire and Ice� (“Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice …�) isn’t actually about fire or ice or even really the end of the world is beside the point. This new Ghostbusters movie is literal-minded enough to slap it atop a tale of an ancient ice demon threatening to destroy the planet.

I jest, a little. There’s no battle, really. Just an ongoing industrial imperative to update a beloved 1984 movie about a bunch of goofy New Yorkers fighting ghosts (an unlikely megahit at the time) into the expansive and bloated world of modern-day tentpole legacyquels. At least they’re back in Manhattan this time. You might recall that the previous installment, Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, solemnly rebooted the series, Force Awakens–style, to the magic-hour wheat fields and mountains of Oklahoma, where the estranged younger generations of the Spengler family slowly (slooowly) unearthed the late Egon Spengler’s ghostbusting artifacts. Frozen Empire isn’t nearly as glacial or tepid as Afterlife, but it does suffer from a similar desire to drown us in Easter eggs. These movies appear to have little interest in recapturing the loose, irreverent comic tone of the original Ghostbusters (or its underrated sequel). So they wear their callbacks like talismans to ward off any suggestion that they’ve misunderstood what made those earlier films so much fun.

This new one, directed by Gil Kenan and written by Kenan and Reitman, returns the nü-Spenglers — nerdy introvert Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), her older brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), mom Callie (Carrie Coon), and former science teacher turned mom’s beau Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) — to the old Tribeca firehouse where the original gang made their base. Now, they’re fully fledged ghostbusters: When the movie opens, they’re speeding down the streets of Manhattan, trying to corral a spectral sewer dragon that’s slithering through the air. Even the old team’s bureaucratic nemesis Walter Peck (William Atherton) is back, this time as the mayor, still angling to finish our heroes off. (If you listen closely during one crowd scene, you can hear someone call him “dickless� again.)

The original ’busters do get a bit more to do this time as well, but just barely. Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz has taken these new folks under his wing, while Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddemore has built a massive paranormal research center where ghosts are kept and studied in labs. There’s more of Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman this time around, too, though the iconic wiseass gets exactly one (1) decent line that’s already been trailered and memed to death. (“Heads up! Tall, dark, and horny at 12 o’ clock.�) Otherwise, the truly tepid gags assigned to him and the rest of the cast suggest that the problem with these movies isn’t so much that the filmmakers don’t want to be funny as it is that they just can’t.

Meanwhile, Kenan handles the obligatory emotional stakes-raising with staid clumsiness, dribbling soft piano music underneath the temporarily sidelined Phoebe’s burgeoning nocturnal friendship with a cool-girl teen ghost from a hundred years ago. There are some romantic overtones to this subplot, which could have been interesting — and their growing bond does feed into the main narrative eventually — but did it ever occur to the filmmakers that the idea of a teenage girl becoming best friends with a ghost could also be, you know, fun?

Frozen Empire does occasionally capture the old magic, or at least it tries to. Patton Oswalt has an engaging cameo as an expert in ancient languages, and he nails the goofy, gee-whiz tone the film otherwise keeps missing. Kumail Nanjiani shows up as an amusingly unreliable layabout eager to sell his late grandmother’s antiques, including an ancient brass orb covered in glyphs that turns out to contain … well, whatever, you know how this stuff goes. There’s a lively bit involving our heroes chasing a haunted garbage bag, and a moment where one of the stone lions at the gates of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street comes to life and tries to eat Dan Aykroyd. However, don’t get your hopes up that the film’s climax might involve some big go-for-broke New York set piece. No, that takes place in a garage, presumably to make the VFX team’s life a little easier.

Ultimately, there’s nothing in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire that will win you over — no great action sequences, no laugh-out-loud jokes, and certainly nothing as inspired as Ghostbusters II’s perfect metaphor of a malevolent ooze fed by the negative energy of New York City seeping into the sewers. The jokes are witless, the emotions artless, and the film joyless. At the same time, there’s also little to repel or offend, which, after all the truly idiotic culture-war battles fought over the Ghostbusters franchise, probably counts as a win. Maybe one day we’ll get an actual movie.