Well, the Ghostbusters are back in theaters again, but does bustin' still make us feel good?
Not really.
Firstly, for a "comedy," this is not a very funny movie. I laughed exactly 8 times, or once every 14.3 minutes! And all of them were attributed to either Paul Rudd or especially Kumail Nanjiani.
So not exactly a laugh riot. But it is jam-packed with more obvious callbacks to the original than you can shake a proton pack at. Some of them seem reasonable, but most seem unnecessary at best or lame at worst. Those largely pointless scenes pad this disjointed cash grab for at least 20 minutes while characters say and do dumb things to drive the plot forward. Choppy editing means characters simply pop up in a scene unestablished, the silly score undermines any drama, and the awful dialog straight-up tells the audience what to think instead of showing us, thereby wasting good actors on bad scripts. Even well-meaning cameos even from alumni like
Bill Murray fall flat.
All of this while also overtly trying too hard to make all of this malarkey somehow "matter" by pulling on your heartstrings with a subplot whose specifics don't make sense from scene to scene much less movie-to-movie.
The plot almost doesn't matter since it barely happens. Here's the official description:
"When the discovery of an ancient artifact unleashes an evil force, Ghostbusters new and old must join forces to protect their home and save the world from a second ice age."
The first two sentences take up 90 minutes of the movie while that second ice age doesn't threaten until the last 25 minutes, and unconvincingly so. There are so many logical problems
with the mechanics of the plot it's hard to start listing them since I may never stop, but I'll give you a single example...
Part of the threat as outlined in the trailer is that this new evil force (Garraka) will release all of the ghosts previously busted to have an army to take over the world.
But why? Garraka's powers are such that he can freeze solid the entire island
of Manhattan from a distance — not that any people freeze, and if they do they're perfectly fine once thawed — making his abilities at once not much of a threat to people while being so powerful that an army is pretty unnecessary.
My fellow (Meta) critics seem to agree in general, with "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" getting only 46% on Metacritic as of this writing and earning a very average " C " from me, meaning I don't recommend it.
But I did sit through the credits so you don't have to: there's no end credits scene, and the mid-credit scene is symbolic of the movie as a whole; not funny, not needed, and lame.
"Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire"
MPAA: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr 55 min
Genres: Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-Fi... Comedy?
RICH'S RATING: C
