How many spirits can “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” fit in a firehouse? This overstuffed, erratically funny entry in the 40-year franchise crams in four main characters from the original 1984 blockbuster, six characters from the 2021 Oklahoma-set spinoff, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” and introduces three new occultists along with an assortment of ghosts, poltergeists, horned phantoms and miniature marshmallow men. At one point, a dozen or so heroes amass at the old Ghostbusters headquarters in Manhattan to protect a storage trap of ghouls that has, like the movie itself, gotten perilously sardined.
In the scenes where the director, Gil Kenan, who wrote the script with Jason Reitman, ponders what it might feel like to let the dead dematerialize for good, the film seems to be asking its fan base if it’s ready to release Bill Murray’s weary parapsychologist, Peter Venkman, from haunting the series when his soul clearly isn’t in it.
“Afterlife” introduced the estranged daughter of Harold Ramis’s Egon Spengler, a single mother named Callie (Carrie Coon), and her teenage children, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard). After the death of their paterfamilias, the family fended off his killer, the Sumerian deity Gozer, with a helpful boost from a high school physics teacher named Gary (Paul Rudd); two young pals, Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) and Podcast (Logan Kim) — yes, Podcast; and the first generation of Ghostbusters, Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), Dr. Venkman (Murray) and the sassy secretary, Janine (Annie Potts).
Now, the Oklahomies (even the unrelated children!) have relocated to Manhattan to speed around town harpooning wild ghosts from the Ectomobile, that beloved vintage hearse. In New York, the posse meets an ancient languages expert (Patton Oswalt), a paranormal engineer (James Acaster, a kooky English comic making his big-screen Hollywood debut) and an in-over-his-head huckster (Kumail Nanjiani) who inherits a nasty little spherical cryptogram with a very bad thing locked inside that’s yearning to unleash a fatal attack of the shivers — a neat idea that, in execution, just looks like a Roland Emmerich disaster movie.
My fingers have taken to their death bed simply typing out the basics. Yet, “Frozen Empire” is an eclectic, enjoyable barrage of nonsense — a circus act that kicks off with a Robert Frost poem and climaxes with Ray Parker Jr.’s titular synth banger. Each scene gets laughs. Strung together, they sputter along with the fragmentary logic of a dream: Characters vanish at key moments and then reappear unexpectedly covered in goo. A demon goes to a vape shop. Once, I could swear the fire station’s brass pole was smelted down. A few beats later it was back in place.
And the subplots are so gauzy and intangible that you’re not sure if they’re real. Is Phoebe, lonely and 15, trying to connect romantically with a pretty blond ghost (Emily Alyn Lind)? Are Callie and Gary actually dating or was that a buddy-buddy fist bump about the time they hooked up as demon dogs? Is 18-year-old Trevor’s entire story arc just that he wants to drive the Ectomobile?
Grace, as Dr. Spengler’s geeky granddaughter, bears much of the mechanics. She can really act, and her Phoebe is quirky and cerebral with an intriguing tickle of goth. You can see hints that the series would be game to have her shoulder the whole thing in a kiddie comedy spin on the “Conjuring” franchise, with Phoebe poking into fresh ghost stories while exploring her own attraction to the Great Beyond.
Perhaps that might have happened if the franchise hadn’t been scarred by the internet flame wars over the 2016 all-female reboot (which does not exist in this timeline). But the film seems spooked to stray from its touchstones: the particle streams, the New York Public Library, Slimer and Murray rattling their chains. At least it reworks them in ways that make us chuckle, like when tiny maggoty versions of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man torture each other with cigarette lighters, or when Paul Rudd recites the Ghostbusters theme song with utter sincerity, as if he were convincing his therapist that busting does make him feel good.
Kenan and Reitman seem to accept that the core audience is over 30. No one younger would giggle as hard as I did at a Discman possessed by an evil Spin Doctors CD. Yet, the nostalgia works best when it captures the rude tone — not the totems — of classic 1980s comedies. The family has an incuriosity about one another’s lives that feels refreshing, a throwback to a time when parents could quip about their kids getting tattoos. And Kenan deftly modulates the tension, toggling between screeching bombast and an eerie hush.
It’s all pleasant enough in a warm-bath-of-ectoplasm kind of way that by the time things wound around to the familiar sight of the Ghostbusters engulfed in a throng of cheering civilians, I felt a flush of futility that I’d bothered to question any of the confusion that herded us toward the inevitable. At risk of provoking Benjamin Franklin’s ghost, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and proton packs.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Rated PG-13 for language, suggestive references and Ghostbuster-on-ghost violence. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters.
