Despite some decent gags there’s very little life left in the tired franchise – it feels like it’s run its course and it’s time to think of something new
The ice age of intellectual property dullness shivers on … and on. The franchise frostbite is setting in; the limbs of once decent films are turning black, but not being amputated. Now the Ghostbusters series is limping back with a new and pointless movie, this one featuring a ghost whose purpose is that it basically freezes stuff (like, say, Batman’s Mr Freeze). It is effectively Ghostbusters 4 – or Ghostbusters 5 if you count the (funny) all-female reboot from 2016, which this franchise clearly doesn’t; the women of that movie are very much not among the legacy-oldsters now invited back for cameos. There are one or two laughs here and an attempt at a queer romance, but no real signs of life.
Well, at least one thing has been fixed. The previous film, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was boringly set in small town Oklahoma, not the big city which is this story’s natural home. Now the family of that movie, Callie (Carrie Coon), her new partner Gary (Paul Rudd) and her kids Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), have moved to New York and are set up in the ghostbusting business, driving the iconic car and headquartered at the legendary former firehouse. The older generation are still around: Winston (Ernie Hudson) is the businessman who owns the building; Ray (Dan Aykroyd) has his own supernaturalist YouTube channel; Janine (Annie Potts) puts in an appearance; and so does the legendary Dr Venkman, in which role Bill Murray looks as if he’s thinking about something else, and not in an intentionally droll way.
