I've just finished watching Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, and the words "For Ivan" pop up in big text over the Ghostbusters theme playing triumphantly in the background as the movie fades to black.
If ghosts were real, I think Ivan Reitman would be angrily haunting that film set right now and trying desperately to get anyone's attention and tell them the sad truth:
This isn't a good movie.
There were a lot of things that went into making the original Ghostbusters movies classics, and this movie attempts to mimic them. But it just doesn't come together. It feels like a series of scenes cut together with little attention paid to an overarching story. Characters feel flat, except maybe Phoebe Spengler. McKenna Grace does a pretty good job with what little she's given, and her 'meet-cute' with the ghost of a teenage girl who bests her at chess ends up being a key part of the story. Nice of the Ghostbusters franchise to hint at queer content, but it's not nearly enough to salvage the mess that is the rest of the story.
Let's take the soundtrack as an example. Sure, we've got the jaunty, iconic theme music. You're hearing it in your head now. It's there. It's sometimes amplified into orchestral arrangements that kind of work thematically. But that wasn't the only music in the original Ghostbusters movies. You know what else was in those movies? Pop music. Fun '80s pop music. Who can forget the music in the scene in the 1984 movie where the ghosts all come out of the sky beam? Well, this movie has a sky beam, and the music doesn't really change for it. It's still a variation on the original theme music, and it just doesn't feel right. And what about Savin' the Day? This movie could have added some fun pop music. Maybe something nostalgic from the '80s. Maybe something modern. It did none of this.
But what about the plot? Well, see, here's where the movie really falls apart. The movie feels chunked together, like it was written in pieces, with no real idea of how the pieces fit together until the end. There is a plot, and it's fine, as plots go, but the pacing is all wrong. Scene jumps happen seemingly at random, with the action in the prior scene not really wrapping up, or the prior scene not really having a point to it at all, only to go to a new scene that isn't really connected to the prior scene. And plot elements are just sort of dropped in willy nilly. And then there are people put into the movie just because they're funny people, and they're funny for their scenes, but they don't really have a character. Kumail Nanjani's character is pivotal to the plot, but he's just Kumail Nanjani playing a guy. Patton Oswalt is in the movie, and he's Patton Oswalt playing a guy. James Acaster is in the movie, and he's James Acaster playing a guy.
Let's analyze the 'climax' of the movie, if it even has one. The BBEG, a thing with horns that wants to freeze the world for reasons that are never really explained, has rolled in this big ice storm into NYC that freezes everything in place. But the ice storm is really polite. It gives our heroes plenty of time to hang out in the firehouse and talk about how to fight it before it even begins to get even a little chilly out. Meanwhile people on the beach were frozen while running away, in a scene essentially stolen from Geostorm.
The ice storm gives Phoebe time to cut down the firepole, melt the brass, and reforge her proton pack with it.
What the actual.
Ryan George and Cinemasins are going to have a field day with this thing.
The original Ghostbusters movies had beautiful, stupid, overblown, triumphant climaxes. The first movie had the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. The second movie had the Ghostbusters riding the Statue of Liberty down NYC streets! This climax is a bunch of people shooting the BBEG with a whole lot of particle beams - inside the firehouse. Blah.
I suppose I should have seen this coming with Afterlife. I didn't hate Afterlife. It has some fun moments. And for some reason, afterward, I really wanted to go to Wal-Mart and get some Baskin Robbins, but that's beside the point. The point is that Afterlife brought back Gozer, the BBEG from the original movie, and Gozer was great, but...kind of flat. In the original movie, Gozer's menace was that Gozer was the bringer of the Destructor, and she asked humanity's heroes to choose the form of the destructor - thus leading to the Marshmallow Man. In Afterlife, Gozer appeared, tore a guy in half, sat on that big throne, said a few things to the conveniently appearing Peter, Ray, and Winston (are you a God? Yes, yes we are. Get it?), and then got chased through a cornfield and eventually defeated. No talk of the Destructor or of choosing its form or anything like that. It was just - "hey, here's Gozer, isn't that cool? Now check out this slightly cringe hologram of Harold Ramis."
And so it went with this movie. Hey, here's a proton pack! Here's Ecto 1 rolling down NYC streets! Here's Slimer! Here's the firehouse! Here are the original characters! Here's that evil EPA dude, who's NYC mayor for some reason, and he still wants to shut down the Ghostbusters!
You also need a coherent plot, guys.
Nothing comes together here, and I just didn't care about the plot or the characters.
I'm sad. Ghostbusters is one of my favorite franchises. I unabashedly love both the 1st and the 2nd movie. And I liked the 2016 movie. And I didn't hate Afterlife.
But this...this just...sucked.
