Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire review – time to consign franchise to the spirit realm

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.

It all starts to kick off when a roguish guy called Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani) attempts to sell Ray an ancient orb belonging to his late grandmother, an occult object which is the only thing stopping humanity being subjected to the tyrannical rule of the above mentioned ice-powered phantom. There’s a good gag here about the Spin Doctors and one really excellent gag about Mary Todd Lincoln. Grace has sympathy and warmth as the ghostbuster developing feelings for a spirit. We get some new character turns: standup comic James Acaster is stuck with the dull role of a boffin called Lars Pinfield, and is given pretty much nothing in the script to allow his natural comedy style to flourish. (The same, sadly, is also true of Rudd.) Patton Oswalt does his best, playing a feisty scholar of the netherworld called Dr Wartzki.

But really among the new contingent the only person who actually brings the all-important comedy is Nanjiani, who has the correct spark of humour and subversion. The younger contingent are all too wide-eyed and innocent, while the senior class of 1984 are too detached. The time has come for Hollywood to allow the spurious Ghostbusters franchise to join Jurassic World and Aquaman in the bin and think of something new.

• Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is out in Australia on 21 March, and in the UK and US on 22 March.