Ghost­busters: Frozen Empire review – for­mu­la­ic and uninspired

Cin­e­ma has its own, unof­fi­cial ver­sion of the famous ​“Pep­si Chal­lenge”, which was a ploy by the cocky mar­ket­ing dept at Pep­si­co who once claimed that, in a blind taste test, con­sumers would nat­u­ral­ly select their prod­uct over sim­i­lar brown sparkling liq­uids. In our test, it’s the preter­nat­ur­al abil­i­ty of the view­er to know whether they’re watch­ing some­thing made for TV or for cin­e­mas based entire­ly on the qual­i­ty of the spe­cial effects.

Which is to say, if the sfx appear slight­ly crum­my or low-rent, the assump­tion would be you’re either watch­ing TV, or a very low-bud­get film – which, at the end of the day, is all a reflec­tion of bud­get and resource. No-one would expect WETA to be rolling out their A mate­r­i­al for a small-screen ser­i­al, and that’s total­ly fine.

But with Gil Kenan’s Ghost­busters: Frozen Empire, a sus­pi­cious­ly quick-turn­around sequel to Jason Reithman’s mod­er­ate­ly suc­cess­ful Ghost­busters: After­life from 2021, there’s a feel­ing that the mak­ers are self-con­scious­ly attempt­ing to blur that line as far as it can be blurred. How low can we go before peo­ple start ask­ing ques­tions? Are these effects just about good enough to pass the cin­e­ma test, or are we out on our ear?

The answer in this instance is a big no, as this craven­ly sen­ti­men­tal escapade scrapes by with some of the most cheap‑o effects work and char­ac­ter design seen in a stu­dio block­buster for quite some time. But, of course, spe­cial effects aren’t the be-all and end-all. If the visu­als are sub-par, then slack can be picked up in the screen­play and the per­for­mances, no? Tech­ni­cal­ly yes, but that’s very much not the case here, with a sto­ry rehashed entire­ly from past adven­tures and a clutch of dead-eyed per­for­mances that look as if the actors are being forced to work in some kind of cine-gulag in return for mil­let and cloudy water.

We join the Spen­gler fam­i­ly (plus Paul Rudd’s rent-a-pop, Gary Groober­son) as they hare through New York traf­fic in their tricked-out Hearse, blast­ing at an escaped appari­tion with their nuclear pro­ton packs and tear­ing up the land­scape. A post-game dress­ing down by may­or Wal­ter Peck (William Ather­ton, an under­pow­ered call-back to the orig­i­nal film) means that Phoebe (McKen­na Grace) can no longer work for the Ghost­buster Mk II due to child labour laws, and so mom Cal­lie (Car­rie Coon) and gawky son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) must make do with­out her.

Then… there’s some rote busi­ness about a dor­mant demigod who wants to send the world (well, New York) into an infi­nite win­ter, Kumail Nan­jiani doing his best impres­sion of Rick Mora­nis, and the old crew return­ing for manda­to­ry lega­cy side roles. The film’s main (sole?) high­light is a very game and sparky per­for­mance form Dan Ack­royd who is the only per­son on screen who seems to be invest­ing in this world.

On the oth­er side of the spec­trum is the come­di­an James Acast­er who crops up as a para­nor­mal researcher called Pin­field and deliv­ers a per­for­mance that’s wood­en even for a bussed-in come­di­an. Wolfhard, mean­while, seems to be giv­ing as much effort as the writ­ers have to his char­ac­ter who spends the major­i­ty of his screen time shot-gun­ning Chee­tos and shrug­ging. Rudd tries his darn­d­est to inject some life and humour into a shock­ing­ly duff screen­play, but is left to dangle.

Phoebe is giv­en the biggest spot­light with a plot-strand involv­ing her bur­geon­ing friend­ship with a friend­ly ghost, yet these scenes go on for so long that they com­plete­ly den­i­grate the dra­ma of the incom­ing apoc­a­lyp­tic event that needs to be dealt with. Every­thing about the film is under­cooked and lazy, and one is led to hope that this fran­chise is put back in the deep freeze for a very long time.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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