(courtesy IMP Awards)
Is it possible to stuff too much into the gargantuan frame of your average blockbuster?
Yes, as it turns out, it is; no matter how big and epic they might seem, it is entirely too throw far too many ideas and plot points and character moments into a film, so that rather than looking like a sleek piece of giant-sized escapist entertainment, it ends up looking like a bloated corpse bobbing about in crashing waves without much direction or appeal.
Case in point is Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the fifth film in the franchise which kicked off forty years ago exactly in 1984 with Ghostbusters, a film which brought together horror, humour and crispily entertaining characterisation to great zeitgeist-dominating success.
While Frozen Empire‘s immediate predecessor, Afterlife, was a weighty film that introduced audiences to the next generation of ghostbusting personnel while nodding its photon-tattered hat to the old guard of Dr Raymond “Ray” Stantz (Dan Akroyd), Dr Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Dr Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) and, of course, the much-loved and missed Harold Ramis as Dr Egon Spengler, its successor doesn’t fare so well, burdened by trying to do much in too short a period of time.
It means that some really lovely narrative threads such as Phoebe Spengler’s (Mckenna Grace) first love or the close bonds between Phoebe, older brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), mum Callie (Carrie Coon) and her partner Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) and the old guard, principally Dr Ray, are lost in a very messy and overdone shuffle.
That’s a pity because as character studies of how disparate characters can end up as family, looking out for each other and united against an unfriendly world by the highly unusual bonds that bind them, Frozen Empire does a rather engaging and lovely job.
It is very much the Spenglers and the old gang, which also rather wonderfully includes Annie Potts as Janine Melnitz (now all suited up as an actual ghostbuster), against a not-so-much disbelieving as disinterested world, represented with cartoonishly overplayed malevolence by William Atherton as the mayor of New York City.
They are the oddest of odd families but also very grounded and normal, and part of the charm and conceit of Frozen Empire, and indeed the whole Ghostbusters franchise, is how ordinary in their trials and concerns the Spenglers are.
They’re not superheroes, they aren’t gifted with extraordinary powers and they aren’t immortal beings bestriding a very mortal world; they are simply ordinary people who love each other and want to do good in the world by getting rid of all kinds of supernatural nasties such the Big band of Frozen Empire, a Satanic-looking being (aren’t they all?) named Garraka, whose thousands of years old and intent with revengeful rage of sending humanity into snap-frozen extinction.
So as a deep dive into what makes a unique family like this tick, Frozen Empire is a low-key, small “d” delight which provides a perfectly lovely escape from the madness of the everyday.
Where the film falls down, and underwhelms massively, is how it handles the looming threat of Garraka.
We know there’s a mysterious orb which has kept Garraka imprisoned for thousands of years, that there’s a Firemaster out there of Indian descent – Nadeem Razmaadi, played with comedic playfulness by Kumail Nanjiani who is rarely allowed by the script to rise above juvenile, well-meaning idiot – who might be able to tame him if he can just apply himself and that there’s a brewing conspiracy to unleash the long-imprisoned god on an unsuspecting world.
But any tension in that regard is dissipated almost as quickly as it limply arises because Frozen Empire, directed by Gil Kenan to a screenplay he co-wrote with Jason Reitman, is too busy stuffing all kinds of bits and pieces around what you assume, and the trailer suggests, is the main event.
The net result is that what appears to be substantial part of the narrative almost ends up as a B story into its own film, shoved against by all kinds of enjoyably fun asides and the aforementioned lives and loves of the Spenglers which, while lovely in their own right, end up taking the main stage at the expense of what could have been a fun if intense battle against a Big Bad.
All of this narrative lack of focus means that while we have a potential great sense of who the Spenglers are and why their sustaining of the Ghostbusters legacy is so important, and have a looming titanic battle that could end or save the world depending on how it’s played, and we even have a lovely series of cameo moments with the legacy characters, Frozen Empire comes out feeling like none of the elements have been given the attention they deserve.
This is especially true of the big finale battle with Garraka, which is over almost before it begins, its lack of potency leaving everything feeling limp and underdone, which is such a pity because the parts that make up the whole are actually reasonably diverting and entertaining in their own ways.
It all means that while Frozen Empire is inoffensively escapist and light & fun it fails to actually stick with you in any meaningful way afterwards.
So much so that it evaporates almost immediately once the credits have rolled, and while you could argue that blockbusters are designed to be enjoyable while they’re being watched and not linger in the heart and mind afterwards, the truth is that many of the really good ones, and alas, Frozen Empire is not one of them, do stick with you and stay with you in ways that really meaningfully lodge themselves in your heart.
Bottomline, Frozen Empire isn’t terrible and you will not rue the day you saw it and indeed may find yourself happily diverted for just two hours, but then it’s not superlatively good either, a stuffed corpse of a film that wants to be so much bigger and better than it is, which is so busy including everything people love about the franchise that it forgets to be its own cohesive film, leaving you lightly entertained in the short-term but largely untouched in the long-term which is not good news for a franchise that longs to keep living long after many of its ’80s contemporaries have slid off this mortal cinematic coil.