Review by C.J. Bunce
After a new Beverly Hills Cop premiere and previews for a new Beetlejuice on its way, the year of 1980s nostalgia continues. It took longer than most movies these days, but Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire finally has made its way to Netflix. Original actors from the 1984 original smash hit are back: Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and William Atherton, plus the cast from the last reboot, 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Mckenna Grace, Finn Wolfhard, Celeste O’Connor, and Logan Kim.
Much better than the previews, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is also the best sequel of them all, spending more time on something the past movies fell short on: actual ghosts and ghostbusting.
Paul Rudd has top billing, but as with the last movie, Mckenna Grace’s Phoebe Spengler, granddaughter of the late Harold Ramis’s Dr. Spengler, is the star. At the same time Dan Aykroyd’s Dr. Ray Stantz, Bill Murray’s Dr. Venkman, and Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddemore are trying to sleuth out a brass orb containing a particularly bad spirit, a family story is happening, with Phoebe feeling left out. She encounters the ghost of a 16-year-old girl named Melody played by Doctor Sleep’s Emily Alyn Lind. We don’t get much of Melody’s backstory unfortunately, but there’s enough going on to put some heart into the story (also supplied by Paul Rudd’s Gary Grooberson, who wants to be Phoebe’s father figure).
Great movies don’t only have great heroes. The actor who became #1 at characters everyone loved to hate in the 1980s in movies like Die Hard, Real Genius, and yes, Ghostbusters, was William Atherton. The script by Jason and Ivan Reitman and director Gil Kenan nicely allows Atherton to play his role as something more worthy of the actor–providing some nice nostalgia. The script also gives the original Ghostbusters some solid throwback dialogue and one-liners. Other nostalgia throwbacks can be found all over the movie, including a scene where Aykroyd’s Ray sees the old ghost in the library again, the Stay-Puft marshmallows deliver some 1980s era fun of the Gremlins variety, the original Slimer takes on Finn Wolfhard, and Annie Potts gets to be an actual Ghostbuster.
Good updates for the franchise include Kumail Nanjiani as the descendant of an ancient Indo-Asian group of Knights Templar-esque Ghostbusters and Patton Oswalt as an expert in ancient folklore. Viewers can also look forward to the best opening scene of the franchise, a fun chase sequence in the Ecto-1, and a flashback to the headquarters when it was a horse carriage firehouse.
If you skipped this thinking it was another sequel, get ready for a pleasant surprise. You don’t want to miss Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, now streaming on Netflix.
