Pardon our dust! We just migrated to a new host and platform, and we're still doing some fine-tuning. Broken images, URLs, etc. will be par for the course.
*½/**** starring Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace written by Gil Kenan & Jason Reitman directed by Gil Kenan
by Walter Chaw Walking out of the Westland Twin into the bright June sun in 1984, my best friend and I agreed that Ghostbusters was the best movie we’d ever seen. Just two 11-year-old idiots in the first week of summer vacation, drunk on soda and popcorn and full to the brim with the magic of being young and stupid. It’s a memory I’ll always treasure, this anecdote from the matinee of my filmgoing experience. I wouldn’t love movies as much as I do if not for the films I saw between 1983 and 1989, that period where I was the most receptive, the most vulnerable, the right amount of inexperienced and ignorant. Movies, for a while, were my secret sharer, my parents, my priest-confessor, my first lover. The Blockbuster Age shaped my tastes, and eventually movies pointed a direction for me to pursue in life through their analysis and contextualization. If I could understand them, the thinking went, maybe I could start to understand my childhood. The me watching Ghostbusters 40 years later finds it to be painful. The experience of that first viewing is so different from my reaction to it now, it’s hard to believe they’re the same film. Age provides an interesting parallax. Ghostbusters is a supernatural Caddyshack hang-out flick that shares the misfortune of being curdled by that specific early-’80s, OG SNL/National Lampoon arrogance, sloth, and nastiness. The best part of it is Rick Moranis, because everything Rick Moranis does in it is unforced. The worst part is the rest, in which may-as-well-be Catskills-veterans peddle their cocaine-fueled shtick, which is aging about as well as Henny Youngman’s and Soupy Sales’s were at the time.
There I go again, the old man rambling on about the past. How much I’d loved the original Ghostbusters was on my mind as I watched this new ‘legacy sequel.’ I thought about how appropriate the subtitle “Frozen Empire” is for something so locked in amber. Consider the film’s dedication to reheating 40-year-old leftovers, trying to pass them off to the same, now-AARP audience for the 1984 original, some of whom have become so ossified and undemanding that ancient cafeteria Salisbury steak is a king’s banquet, oh boy–though most are still sentient enough to want more than whatever this grey-ass gruel is. I rather liked the last Ghostbusters (Afterlife), mainly because it leaned hard into nostalgia without turning into necrophilia until the last 20 minutes or so. I liked unconventional tweener Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) working through her grief and neurodivergence. (What better metaphor for a supernatural haunting than a feeling of social dissociation?) I loved her mom, Callie (Carrie Coon), who sparked as a real live human yearning for a happy ending but burying that hunger beneath mountains of bitterness and rage at life’s cruel betrayals. It’s not a good movie, you know, but there are things in there to hang a hat on.
Phoebe is still good in Frozen Empire. Indeed, she’s at the centre of a rich subplot that almost justifies taking this movie seriously. But Callie is happy in love with good-natured schlemiel Gary Gooberson (Paul Rudd), and it’s sanded her edges off. There’s nothing left to use as a foothold into her character–not for Coon, who could bring dimension to a reading of the phone book, and not for us: We could immediately name 30 other people who would have been equally good as a limp mom-noodle in a jumpsuit. Many of you by this point are irritated I’m even trying to talk about character in a movie you’re supposed to like unconditionally–and, you got me, some things weren’t designed to be treated with respect. The rest of you are irritated I’ve spent all this time spinning my wheels in the mud of my misspent youth instead of touching on what happens in Frozen Empire. Fair enough. This time, the Ghostbusters accidentally release a Diablo III boss and then need to capture it again. There isn’t enough plot here to drive a five-minute short film. The picture opens, as I have, with an interminable preamble designed to remind everyone how much they used to love this garbage when they were younger. As it’s doing this in a movie its intended audience is already watching, I don’t know who they think needs reminding. Be heartened, though, stans of Library Shush Lady and Slimer. I shall say no more.
The single element of the film that generates fascination involves Phoebe. Grounded from busting ghosts because she’s a minor, she wanders an empty New York and befriends sad goth-girl ghost Melody (Emily Ayn Lind) over a game of chess in Central Park. These two adorable outcasts forge a bond in a literal “Ghost World” scenario, and it’s clear that both Grace and Lind are in on the romantic implications of their budding relationship. Phoebe decides to The Frighteners herself into the spirit realm to spend time with Melody at Melody’s “place,” as it were. Little does Phoebe know, Melody is catfishing her to be reunited with her family (even though Phoebe could free every ghost in New York simply by flipping a switch, which is the main tension point for the rest of the fucking movie)–meaning this story of young love has a few weighty family implications. Take away the franchise’s patented technobabble mumbo-jumbo and this is the story of two young women, ostracized and exiled from broken families, conspiring to be together–with one killing herself when they can’t. Does Frozen Empire lean into this story and allow Grace to further forge her character into a compelling, even heartbreaking figure? Or does it decide to spend that time with Bill Murray drunk-rambling his way through his eight-hour/eight-figure contract holding updated proton guns against firehouse backdrops like the live ads from The Truman Show? I mean, shit, the Melody ghost is literally smouldering from the tenement fire that killed her.
Melody makes her first appearance about 10 minutes into the film. There’s lots of bullshit before she shows up again a half-hour later. She and Phoebe flirt as Melody floats outside her window, Salem’s Lot-style, with Melody saying, in her Wednesday Addams way (the current vogue, it seems), that she “feels a warm rush.” Phoebe shudders, as anyone would. If Frozen Empire gets any traction at all, it will be, deservedly, as an LGBTQ+ cult classic. Their shared sadness is electric. Their chemistry is electric. The heart of this very bad, very dull movie is this extraordinarily electric romance, which this very expensive Intellectual Property will not permit to be foregrounded. Treating it as a plot point that launches the final 20 minutes of deadening pyrotechnics humiliates the relationship’s power, reducing Phoebe to a doe-eyed mark deserving of her demotion to a wallflower whose naivety is dangerous. Of all the people in this film worthy of being taken down a couple of notches… I mean, there’s a scene where Gary essentially just recites the lyrics to the Ray Parker Jr. song. It’s disturbing to realize that, more often than not, lesbian romances are the default chink in the good guys’ armour in genre films (see the recent Scream VI): The love that dare not speak its name punished so that societal order may be restored. That fucking sucks.
Anyway, there’s another 45-minute gap between Melody’s second and third appearances, during which more tedious bullshit, leavened by a sharp cameo from Patton Oswalt as the de rigueur exposition dumpologist and a nifty animated history that leads directly to the scene where Phoebe basically kills herself to be with her beloved. Were you to pull these three sequences out of the film and have them anchor a different, non-Ghostbusters vehicle, you’d have the makings of something emotionally resonant and thorny, a piece that deals with guilt, with how vulnerable kids in this community are, with the choices we make when we’re small that produce consequences we carry with us for the rest of our lives. Because this is a Ghostbusters franchise pic, the first thing that happens when Phoebe appears on “the other side” is a monster who needs her body to speak an ancient, dead language to effect his release barks supervillain threats at her in English. I’m not picking at lore, I’m saying this is the absolute laziest choice, intended for the laziest audience in the world. Frozen Empire belongs to a genre of mass entertainments that have as their defining feature their ease of consumption. It’s like labelling food according to the extent that someone has chewed it for you. The investments are too large to risk someone choking on nuance, after all. That Frozen Empire even threatens to have something like Phoebe/Melody happen makes it a good example of shameless, soul-sucking exercises like this. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.
