The important takeaway from GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE, and, if one is being blunt, the only reason for it to exist, aside from those delightful miniature Stay-Puft marshmallow imps, is the delightful discovery that Kumail Nanjiani may very well be the cinematic heir of Bill Murray. Certainly, they are the only ones who consistently seem to understand that the reason for the original’s success as a supernatural comedy was that it was so very ridiculous, and that the best way to play that is with the delicious ironic remove that those two fine thespians embrace so well. It almost makes up for the mawkishness to which Dan Ackroyd, co-writer of the original, clings with grim determination.
The rest of the cast do their best in a script by Jason Reitman, Ivan’s son, and Gil Kenan, who also directed, that would rather be an ersatz Hallmark flick about finding family than a subversive comedy of ghosts, curses, and a very old, very ticked off demon. The story finds the family Spengler transplanted from Oklahoma back to the abandoned firehouse in Manhattan that served as the base of the original Ghostbusters. Ex-high school science teacher, Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) is along, having declared if not defined his relationship with mom Callie (Carrie Coon), and working his way into being accepted by her two kids, 18-year-old Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and 15-year-old science whiz Phoebe (Mckenna Grace). As we catch up with the Spenglers, their vintage ghost containment unit is on the fritz, their vintage Ghostbuster-mobile (and former hearse) is overheating, and both teenagers are itching to become adults. That is more than just a driver’s license and a later curfew. That would be becoming fully fledged members of the ghostbusting team co-founded by their grandfather, a dream that becomes even more distant after they all scamper off after a sewer dragon. Sure, they capture it, but the path of destruction causes their old nemesis, Walter Peck (William Atherton) now the mayor of New York, to put them on notice that their days are numbered. For most of them, anyway. For underage Phoebe, it’s the end of careening through traffic while shooting her proton accelerator with wild abandon.
Her sulk alone in Washington Square after dark introduces us all to Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), the flaming ghost of a 16-year-old who died in the tenement fire she accidentally started. Phoebe’s path to redemption for being underage is introduced by way of Nadeem (Nanjiani), a wastrel slowly selling off his dead grandmother’s effects in order to stay financially afloat. The latest bauble up for sale is an orb that registers off the chart when ex-Ghostbuster Ray Stantz (Ackroyd) uses his spiritual energy detector before making an offer to Nadeem and adding it to the collection of oddities in the shop he runs.
Of course, it’s not just any orb with outsized spiritual energy, it will mean the end of life as we know it if it falls into the wrong hands. And, further of course, it will. How else to ratchet up those special effects and compete with the past glories of the Statue of Liberty stomping the streets of New York.
Those effects are terrific, even the smaller ones such as the way blue flames wash over Melody, or those Stay Puft imps carouse with extreme mischief, limitless smiling innocence plastered on those pudgy faces. Also good are Wolfhard and Grace, who have all the ironic remove necessary, but not the script to let them unleash it to its fullest. Grace is great and yet also oddly moving as she sullenly flirts with Melody in a piquant take on the sort of star-crossed romance that afflicted Romeo and Juliet.
If the writing floats in too much treacle, the direction suffers the inertia such a substance inflicts, resulting in a noticeable and irritating lack of energy throughout. And then there’s the big bad thing from the orb. Nicely rendered as a wispy wraith with oversized horns, it doesn’t seem to have spent the last several millennia coming up with a plan to destroy humanity in anything resembling efficiency. Instead of an implacable killing machine, it’s a languid stroller through Manhattan, taking out a few token victims before meandering off to finish off the Ghostbusters and their firehouse for reasons that should have brought it there to begin with. It’s so annoying in retrospect that I’ve ended a sentence with a preposition.
GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE starts with a quote from Robert Frost about how the world will end. More apt would have been T.S. Eliot’s poetic assertion that the world (read this franchise) will end not with a bang, but a whimper. Unless they spin off Murray and Nanjiani. And those marshmallow imps.
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