Bustin' Still, Mostly, Makes Me Feel Good

 The wife and I have seen Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.

It's not bad.

It's not a great film by any means, and it will not make sense to you if you haven't seen the original films or Afterlife, but it is mostly good. I'd rank it on par with Afterlife, perhaps a little lower.

That being said, it does suffer from a number of pacing issues, as Afterlife did. It is yet another film that takes a while to build plot-wise, and when it finally gets there, that great build-up/plot is resolved far too quickly. 

There are several side stories/side adventures (writers would call these B plots, C plots, etc) that are sort of shoehorned into the film, either deftly or haphazardly. Almost none of them are truly necessary, though a couple of them make the film better. It feels like the film was poorly edited together, almost by committee, and Columbia Pictures was like "well, we filmed this, let's find a way to make it work."

In an attempt to avoid most spoilers, I'm going to give a brief rundown of the goods and bads of the movie:

The Goods:

• Ecto-1 and the Firehouse both get a LOT of screen-time. Like way more than you might think. I'd classify both of them as characters in the movie, honestly.
• The acting is pretty good, and the cast meshes really well together. Paul Rudd and Mckenna Grace especially shine in their roles.
• There is a surprisingly good part in the movie for actress Emily Alyn Lind, and she is wonderful in that part. 
• Yes, there are new Proton Pack designs (at least two different new designs -- not really a spoiler, they're both seen in the trailers). 
• The ghost designs this time around are genuinely scary and/or grotesque.
• The villain is well-described, well-historied, and the build-up is appropriate.
• The original song is in the movie (in more than one place). 
• There is a fun little mid-credits scene.
• The original film's score is used again, in many places and different ways.
• There are many little easter eggs to catch in the background if you're paying close enough attention.
• It is very clear that -- as the writers said -- they drew inspiration for the film from the episodic nature of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, and in a lot of ways this is good.
• Nobody dies (who wasn't already dead, anyway). 
• It is fun, mostly family-friendly, and it has a lot of heart in the best ways.
• It is left open-ended (much like Afterlife) -- we know we'll likely see these characters again.

The Bads:

• It is very clear that -- as the writers said -- they drew inspiration for the film from the episodic nature of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, and in a lot of ways this is bad when this sort of thinking is applied to a feature film.
• The new actors to the franchise -- namely Patton Oswalt and James Acaster -- are criminally underutilized -- and the new ones who aren't criminally underutilized (Kumail Nanjiani, for one) get far too much screen time and are played for cheap laughs.
• Janine Melnitz, as a character in the film, is also criminally underutilized.
• I personally think (as in, this is purely my opinion) that the Spengler family dynamic is given way too much focus in the film -- would be great in a single episode of a TV series, yes, but in a feature film? Move it along, we've got plot to get to.
• What you see is what you get -- if you've seen the trailers, you've basically seen the movie. Nothing will really surprise you here. It's one of the more egregious cases of the trailers giving away the film's entire plot that I've seen in many years.
• Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis do not return to the film/franchise. 
• The red parkas that the internet went wild over when the first trailer(s) came out do indeed appear in the movie, but in very brief appearances. 
• There are some plot holes. Not a lot, but they are there. Most people likely wouldn't notice them as much as I did.
• There is a lot of action without much explanation -- meaning I'd like to see some background, I'd like to see some of the gap history of what happened between Afterlife and this film. The viewer really doesn't get that.
• As mentioned above -- the climax of the film happens and is resolved FAR too quickly. I'm talking a two hour buildup to a probably less-than-five-minutes-of-movie resolution, all is better, all is as it should be and was before the movie started. It feels cheap and very rushed. 
• Getting back to the trailers -- there are several really great shots/clips shown in the trailers that don't make it into the finished film. This isn't unique to this movie, but it's worth noting.
• The goofy red stripes down Ecto-1's hood aren't explained. Minor gripe, I know.
• Some of the original cast's performances (not all of them, but some) really border on caricature, as if they're tongue-in-cheek making fun on themselves and/or the franchise. 
• There have now been five different Ghostbusters films, total -- I'd rank this one towards the bottom of the list simply because -- as I've seen some reviewers point out -- it's ultimately forgettable. 
• Because of that, and after this weekend's hype dies down and word of mouth really gets out -- I think it's going to underperform at the box office, sadly. It'll still make its money back and make a good profit, but this isn't going to be one of those "this movie is going to make a billion dollars in a month" films.

Look, I mostly liked the movie, but here's the current Rotten Tomatoes score for it:

I think this is mostly accurate. My own rating for it would likely be 70%-ish. A lot of critics are going to think it's derivative, and a lot of the audience is going to really like it regardless. I'm in-between at present.

I want to stress that it is not bad. It really isn't a bad movie. Daisy said she thinks it's the best one since the original, and I think that's a bit too high praise for it -- but maybe a lot of other folks will think the same. It's basically a two-hour episode of the cartoon put to live-action, and not even one of the top ten best episodes. It's fine, it's new Ghostbusters material, new additions to the canon, but it's nothing life-changing. For the casual fan I'd honestly say skip it and wait for it to hit streaming someplace. 

And still...with the story arc they had, I'm not sure it could've been done any "better" or any differently. At least not in a truly noticeable way. There are many times where I've described a film as "brilliant concept with extremely terrible execution" -- that isn't Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Its execution was perfectly fine (well, mostly), yet I'm still feeling a little hollow after seeing it. 

Will I still buy the Blu-ray?

You bet your ass.