Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

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Like with many 'Ghostbusters' fans who were looking forward to this movie, I read and watched a few critic reviews for it before going in. It wasn't doing well, and my only reaction to it was as simple as "wait for the fans' reaction". Thankfully, almost across the board, fans came out of this thinking it was pretty great, but also really drilling into critics for having their opinions. And when it comes to such a divide as that, that's when I really enjoy writing my reviews, as I can easily see the argument from both sides.

Now, I'm not gonna sit here at my desk ripping something to pieces, but if I'm brutally honest with myself, I left the theatre liking it more than I probably actually did overall, as my fandom was kind of cranked to eleven for this. But don't worry, I'll get into everything I liked about it just as much, and at the end of the day, I'm still a huge fan of all of this, and would love to see more. But I should say that when I want to see more, I want to see this new crew move on with their new missions after this because as far as I'm concerned, the torch has officially been passed.

We hit the ground running with the new Ghostbuster crew/family, consisting of the Spenglers, Callie (Carrie Coon) and her kids, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Callie's now intimate partner, Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) as they drive Ecto-1 through the streets of Manhattan, giving chase to a ghost, and showing us how their skills have evolved over the past few years. Presumably, the old firehouse was handed to them by Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) after the torch was sort of passed to this family at the end of the last film, and they are the new Ghostbusters.

In the aftermath of this destructive mission, the Spenglers are brought in front of Mayor Walter Peck (William Atherton), who has been looking for an excuse to shut down the Ghostbusters for ages. As leverage, the now somewhat rebelious 15-year-old Phoebe is taken out of the field, and the story turns largely more about her being upset about things and needing to "grow up", show more responsibility, listen to her mother, etc. She evntually meets and befriends a ghost named Melody (Emily Alyn Lind) and everything between them feels very much inspired by 'Casper the Friendly Ghost' concepts.

Meanwhile, our side characters Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky (Celeste O'Connor) work for Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Winston, respectively, studying haunted and possessed objects and testing new equipment, some of which has the ability to extract a spirit from an object and trap it, indefinitely. One day, a guy named Nadeem Razmaadi (Kumail Nanjiani) brings Ray a mysterious orb that has been in his family for ages, and inside said orb lies the big baddie threat of this movie, a master of ice a snow, a demon-like creature named Garraka who, if freed, will wreak frozen havok on the world.

Critically, we have the return of these mini marshmallow men who, despite how cute they are, are basically here to be 'Despicable Me'. They seem to still be attached to Podcast in some way from the last movie, where they're also not explained very well. The best I can do is that they are meant to be leftover spiritual residue from the first fight with Gozer, which is where the 100-foot Marshmallow Man came into play. Besides that, we also already had out big nostalgic hit with 'Afterlife', so I don't see a whole lot of reason to throw so much of it at us at this point. Although the old toy commercials were a pretty great flashback.

But for as much as I understand where critics are coming from with this, I have to admit that I still had fun with this for the most part. But it's a bit more about developing Phoebe and pretty much only Phoebe while giving us a bit of the old crew, namely Ray (who almost carries this movie) and Winston while Peter (Billy Murray), Janine (Annie Potts) and even Slimer are really only there for nostalgic purposes. Bottom line, If you're a long-time fan, check it out. If nothing else, it'll be a fun ride. If you're a critic, you're just doing your job, and even as a die hard fan of all this, I can't deny that it could have been much better than it was.

3/5

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