Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the fifth film in the franchise and a direct sequel to Ghostbusters: Afterlife from 2021 and set two years after the events of that film. Ghostbusters: Afterlife was a pleasant surprise. I liked the new characters and really enjoyed the first two thirds. I felt, though, it fell apart in the final act when all sorts of different ghosts appeared and the story started to feel really overblown.
Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, Finn Wolfhard and McKenna Grace all reprise their roles. The family have relocated to the famous fire station in New York to restart the Ghostbusting business. They find that they have to save the city from a death chilling god who seeks to build a spectral army.
The surviving members of the team from the original 1984 movie, played by Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, and Annie Potts also all appear and that is indicative of the problems this film has. All of them are shoe-horned in to no great effect, seemingly just to please the fans of the series.
After a good opening chase through Manhattan, things get bogged down. There are too many plotlines and too many characters. It felt like a grind sitting through a story with too many callbacks to previous entries.
There are a couple of amusing moments, but not enough, and it is nowhere near as much fun as the unfairly maligned 2016 reboot. I hope that this is the end of the series in its current form.
Rating: 4 out of 10