Full disclosure, I never grew up with the Ghostbusters movies. I enjoyed the original 1984 Ghostbusters, and am not just a defender of the 2016 Paul Feig-directed all-female Ghostbusters remake, I think it’s a very fun, very memorable take on the material that holds up in subsequent rewatches, with great comedic chemistry between the leads, and more jokes that landed than not. And I absolutely hated Jason Reitman’s 2021 reboot Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Which, one – forgot that these movies are supposed to be comedies, and two – indulged in the crudest, most uninspired kind of fan service, and felt designed to specifically appeal to the worst people on the internet – the people who actively sent Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon death threats in 2016 for “ruining their childhoods”.

So, I was not looking forward to any kind of follow-up to Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which remains one of the worst films I have seen so far this decade. Well, color me surprised… I didn’t leave Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire wanting to actively murder this movie. Frozen Empire is messy, overstuffed with characters – characters you met in the last movie, characters from the original 1980s films, characters new to this movie, and so little of it matters. And yet, when it works, it kind of works better than I would have expected.

Phoebe Spangler (McKenna Grace) and her family – brother (Finn Wolfhard), mother (Carrie Coon) and father figure (Paul Rudd), after learning about her grandfather’s past, go to New York City and team up with the original Ghostbusters, and a bunch of other people as well (don’t make me list all of the characters here) to take on a malevolent spirit that wants to destroy the city as they know it. 

There is still shallow, annoying fan service in Frozen Empire. It doesn’t make any sense how the in-universe Ghostbusters of the 1980s know about the infamous Ray Parker Jr. song, and how it was a big hit on MTV. When Paul Rudd quotes a line from that song, I actively felt my stomach turn. And the script still doesn’t give the spectacular Carrie Coon anything interesting to do. She is one of the most talented actresses working today and she is pretty much relegated to just playing the mom. Paul Rudd is aiming for charming and sometimes gets there, is sometimes a bit grating. Finn Wolfhard might age into an interesting performer. I don’t think he’s there yet.

However, the character of Phoebe Spangler, the nepo baby from heaven/this series’ ‘chosen one’, actually is given some interesting material to work with this time around, even if the film can’t commit to exploring the implications of her story fully. I really liked McKenna Grace here, and I kind of hope we get to see this character age into a proper badass. If we were to get a final film that cut down on the background noise and just followed an adult version of this character, that’s a film I would be very excited to see. However, we also need to have gags involving Slimer and the Stay Puft marshmallow men, because advertising and merchandise.

Everything else here is exactly what you’d expect it to be. There are 350 characters in this movie, and it is exhausting to remember who’s who and remember why any of this is important. Paul Rudd sometimes just seems bored. Kumail Nanjani seems like he’s having fun. Everyone from the original cast – Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, etc. – with the potential exception of Dan Ackroyd, seems disengaged here. They’re all here to get paid. But this film does not desecrate the corpse of Harold Ramis, which immediately gives this one more points than Afterlife. 

Overall, I’m tempted to say Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a pleasant surprise, even though it’s still engaging in the worst kind of fan service, and it’s never any fun, and it’s still taking the alleged lore of the Ghostbusters series way too seriously. Also, you will forget about this movie in five minutes. There is no staying power here. The narrative is all over the place and the CGI looks a bit terrible intermittently. But it is ultimately an improvement over what came before it. Do I ever need to see any of these people again, in any context relating to the Ghostbusters series? I sure do not. But at least I was able to make it through this one without becoming actively angry. So, that’s something.