PremiumGhostbusters Frozen Empire review: Ghostbusters, old and new, assemble for lame takedown of ice-cold villain
Last Updated: 08.57 AM, Apr 27, 2024
Ghostbusters Frozen Empire story: Forbidden from being on the Ecto-1 and busting ghosts because she is still a minor, Phoebe Spengler (McKenna Grace) ends up befriending the ghost of a girl, Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), who’d died in a fire aged 16, when she’s not hanging around Ray Stantz’ (Dan Aykroyd) store where he deals with items of the occult. Melody’s folks are also no more and she yearns to join them in the ‘other realm’, which she’s promised by an ancient evil spirit with the power to freeze the world. All she has to do is to get Phoebe to free him from the orb he’s imprisoned in. Can the Spengler family and the erstwhile Ghostbusters save the world?
Ghostbusters Frozen Empire review: When Paul Rudd’s former science teacher and now ghostbuster Gary Grooberson first sees Garakka, the demonic god who wants to conquer the world and unleash another ice age, he describes this new adversary as tall, dark and horny. Yeah well, that’s pretty much all there is to Garakka, who, despite his death chill powers does not come across as particularly scary.
For several generations, Garakka has been imprisoned in an orb that was under the safekeeping of the firemasters, a group of mystical ghostbusters. Garakka senses a chance at freedom and world destruction, when the grandson of the last firemaster who’d hidden the orb sells it to Ray Stantz. The inscriptions and the readings Ray gets from the orb tell him that something’s trapped within and that whatever it is can’t be any good.
To break free from the orb, Garakka needs a human being to recite a particular chant and he reckons that Phoebe should do it, with a little push from Melody. As a villain who could communicate to other ghosts and get them to do his bidding long before he even stepped out of confinement, and then set many of them free, Garakka should have been a tough nut to crack. But by the time the narrative builds up to the moment that Garakka is ready to unleash his destructive icy breath on all of humanity, we are in the final moments of the film and get what can only be described as a pretty lame showdown.
And this is in a film with a cast that includes Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Patton Oswalt and Kumail Nanjiani. McKenna Grace’s Phoebe is the central arc of this film, with the makers even hinting at a budding romance between her and Melody. But after building up to it and having Phoebe even risk hurting/harming herself by using the Ionic separator to be with Melody, if only for two minutes, there’s nothing more to that.
Ghostbusters Frozen Empire verdict: Unless you are a teen and adore McKenna Grace and Finn Wolfhard, even though the later hardly has anything of impact to say or do in the film, you are more likely to walk out of the theatre with a numbing cold icy feeling in your heart. This is an experience you’d want to forget and fast.
If you'd like to watch Ghostbusters: Afterlife about how the Spenglers came to be the new ghostbusters, you can rent it on Zee5 with the OTTplay Power Play pack.