 A few days ago, I reviewed Ghostbusters Frozen Empire. I wasn't a big fan, to say the least. Now I'm gonna spoil the crap out of it. So if you haven't watched that movie yet, you don't want spoilers. Walk away from this, because I'm going to be going into a lot of stuff that is gonna maybe salt the movie for you. But if you don't care, because you were already salty on the franchise like 12, 15, 20 years ago, then feel free to join me. Here's my spoiler thoughts on Ghostbusters Frozen Franchise. I mean Frozen Empire. Now, I feel like I always have to preface these by saying, listen, I don't pretend to be an expert at really anything in this world. I just like watching a lot of movies. So when I do spoiler reviews or reviews in general, I'm talking to you like I would talk to a friend after seeing the film. I'm not talking down. I'm not acting better. Because at the end of the day, this is all entertainment. It's all subjective. The art side of it, as I think got out the window long ago. When it comes to art and film, I think it's very far and few between. Most of this stuff is a product now. And that's just how this film felt to me. It felt like it was a bunch of pieces put in place to generate money, but not much else. Someone always inevitably also says, Adam, these are all made for money. And that's why people put it. Yeah, that's true. But it was always kind of a hand in hand thing. You are making art and you're generating revenue at the same time. And yeah, sometimes the art is John Wick killing guys. But there is still an art form there. When it comes to the choreography, setting up the shots and all that stuff. And you can say that in a sense, Frozen Empire has a little bit of that too. But I just was so jaded on the whole property. Mainly because I thought Ghostbusters Afterlife was not great. I hate that it pandered to the audience so much and it really tugged at the heartstrings in the most disingenuous way. People weren't sad and crying because Egon came back. They were sad and crying because the actor died in real life. Harold Ramis. Regardless, a lot of people like that movie. And that's perfectly great. I actually went with my family to it years ago when it came out and they had a good time. I was the only one really sitting there kind of rolling my eyes. The Staypuff Marshmallow babies were there to be merchandise. And the whole thing reeked of cash grab to me. The whole thing reeked of nostalgia bait. And here we are now with Frozen Empire, a movie that I thought was going to get past that. The trailers looked very promising. I love that they introduced this new villain. They got their own lore now. And they really have to stand out on their own. But as we've seen from countless films now they do the soft reboot where they bring back the legacy characters and they kind of redo the first movie in a sense. When you have to stand on your own, it's a lot harder proposition. It's a lot harder for them to stick the landing. And that's exactly I think what happened with Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom, and Star Wars the Last Jedi and a bunch of other films that came out doing the soft reboot thing. And so here we are again with Ghost Pusters coming off of Afterlife. It brought back Gozer. It brought back the Keymasters and all that crap. And now we have a new thing. Well, it started out, I thought pretty damn good. Before I dive in though, hit that subscribe button. I talk about movies every week on the channel. It's all movies all the time. I don't bring in religion, politics, all that stuff. I don't have a slant one way or the other. I don't care about that. I just wanted to watch good movies and talk with you. And I watch a lot of movies. Okay, here we are. Frozen Empire, as I was stating, starts out on a really great note. Driving that Ecto-1 downtown New York. We're back in the hometown of the Ghost Busters. There's a giant ghost on the run. Take flight. So they're in the car in pursuit. And by they, I mean the family now. We got the Spanglers, the mother, the two kids, and the boyfriend who's trying to find his place in the family. What is his role? What can he say? Can he punish them, et cetera? The main focus of this one again is on Phoebe Spangler, played by McKenna Grace. She's lovely. I love her. She's got this whole Rick Moranis vibe going on with the look. However, in this movie, she's kind of a sad sack. The script makes her out to be this miserable 15-year-old girl who doesn't know her place within the family. And she wants to bust ghosts. And they're going to take that from her later. And that's where I think the movie really starts to fall into its face. But the pro is this opening scene, this five-minute, 10-minute chase sequence. Downtown, sewers are flying up. Manhole covers are smashing into cars. It's whipping out of traffic. At one point, they go by the cops who are sponsoring Dunkin' Donuts. And the one cop's like, should we go after them? And the other goes, let's let the Ghostbusters handle this one. That was great. I appreciate that the Ghostbusters have now kind of become a household name within the city. And the cops even know about them. And they let them do their thing. They stay out of their way. Very well. Very good way to reintroduce these characters. And so when this scene fires up, I thought, holy crap, they're doing it. It's fun. It's lively. They're actually going after ghosts in this one until I realize later, this would be the only ghost they ever bust in the entire film until the way you end. How do you keep making Ghostbusters movies without having them bust the damn ghosts? It's 2024. We have the technology. Come on, people. Anyway, they're driving. She goes out in the gunner's seat. It's very cool. And that sequence, it ends impressively. And then the title comes on though, which was a little weird. The Ghostbuster title felt very unceremonious. I know it's kind of trying to match the past ones, but it didn't have that kick in that. It just kind of shows up. And from this point on, I'm not going to be going chronologically. I'm just going to try to come up the top of my head what I recall about the film. One major thing is Finn Wolfhard's character, Trevor. What the hell is this? He's 18. He's awkward. He's trying to find himself. And that's his entire arc that never really gets finished. He seriously is barely in this movie. He shows up kind of randomly throughout. They give him a subplot with Slimer that goes nowhere. It's incredibly lame to watch. And again, just tipping the hat to the fans. We got Slimer in this one. That stuff was just all so nothing. It was so stale. And that's kind of how I felt after that main intro sequence was just nothing across the board. Just, all right, it's Ghostbusters. We have the old dogs back again for one last ride again until the next one. And they're probably going to be Harrison Ford. Ray Stance is going to be there when he's freaking 85, putting on the proton pack. Bill Murray just put him cash in his pocket. And he's like, all right, what do I have to say? Two lines and then I can leave? Great. This franchise sucks. But all right, here we go. Bill Murray notoriously doesn't like Ghostbusters 2. Wouldn't come back for many, many years until, I guess, Egon died. Until Herod Ramis flapped. And he's like, sure, I'll come back and get some cash grabs out of this. Because without Harold, I know for 100% certainty that there's nothing more life in these films. And so I'll just cash out. And fair enough, Bill, fair enough. Okay, Finn Wolfhardt's character terrible. With the power of editing, I could actually start with what I'm going to say next and move things around chronologically speaking. But I'm not going to. I'm just going to be real with you. I completely forgot about the actual intro, which was set back decades earlier with a fire department checking out a disturbance. And they touch a handle. It's frozen. They go inside and they're instantaneously taken out. Elsa style, the power of ice freezes them in place. This was a great introduction, which I forgot about. So we have a couple sequences in a row that really set the stage for what's to come. We get a teaser of our villain. We also get a teaser of what's going to be the fire bender, the fire lord, fire savior. I forgot the word, the fire something or another. This is the person that's going to be responsible for taking out this new threat. I had to look it up, but the name is Garaka. Garaka is the new villain of this picture. He's basically an ice god. He wants to bring upon the end of humanity by freezing everything, hence the title Frozen Empire. You'll find out though that this frozen empire doesn't really ever take shape. And it's really not until the last 10 minutes where things start to freeze over, but we'll get there. We have to spend a lot of time with the ghost girl first. But before we get to her, we have to introduce Kumal Nujani's character Nadim. He's new to this franchise. He starts out really funny. And as this movie progresses, he might get more annoying to you or just downright awful like he was to me because of what we do with this character, which is reveal that he is in fact this fire protector guy. He has the power to pyro things like X-Men. He can move fire and throw fireballs and Hadookins. And it just gets really cringy, I thought. I thought it just felt really out of place. Even for a Ghostbusters movie, it seemed like a bit too much for me. And maybe it has to do with the tone of these films. I felt like this one in afterlife are so serious in a lot of ways. But then in the other sense, they want to be funny and silly. Like in afterlife, I think about the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper sequence where they're doing their mating ritual and how wildly out of place that felt with the tone of the rest of the movie. That was very somber. I almost had an indie vibe to it. Like I'm watching a film by Zach Braff for some of it. But this one is a little lighter. It is more fun. It's more corny, campy, but it still has that serious side. But not the serious side of the OGs. The OGs felt like dark comedies in a lot of ways. They felt very intense. They were actually scary. And these don't have scares in them. These ones feel like Disney presents Ghostbusters. Nadim shows up at Ray Stance's shop with an artifact. Dan Aykroyd is back reprising his role. Love Dan Aykroyd in these films. I said this in my review though. These are not the guys we grew up with. All right, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd. They're old now. They're in their 70s or 80s or something. I'm not even sure they're age, but they're not the same guys. We're not watching the Ghostbusters from the late 80s bouncing witty dialogue off each other, riffing, having a great time. No, these are guys in their Twilight years. Okay, so they feel like stand-ins for characters. They're like the NPCs you find in Fortnite. You show up to them. He's like, hello, I'm Ray Stance. What do you want to do today? What are you selling? And it's not the fault of the actor. It's just the writing is not servicing them at all. And it's not the same feel of the originals. So seeing him is great. You know, it's great that he's there, but kind of like Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. It's just not playing out the same as it used to. And that's okay. Time wears on all of us. I'm not the same guy I was even 10 years ago. Things change. People grow. They look different. They sound different. They have different cadences. It's just going to be different. Moving past that, he gets this artifact. He buys it from Nadim. And he's very fascinated by the thing. He knows a little bit about the inscription, but he has to take it to the library where Patton Oswald is going to work. And he's going to give a sermon, a lecture on what this thing is. We're going to get a huge, rich backstory on this character, on this God, and how he was captured by a firekeeper thing. And it's a very long monologue, a lot of exposition there. People will appreciate it from the building of the lower standpoint. I found it was a bit much and really unnecessary, considering what a threat this character isn't at the end of the day and how little screen time he has. While that's happening, Dickless Mayor Walter Peck is back. I mean, he's the mayor now. He's moved up in the world. It was, I guess, fine to see him again. But once more, not the same character. They're trying, but it's not the same character. They're not coming off that same way. He's pissed. He hates the Ghostbusters still, 30 years later or whatever it's been, and he's going to clip their wings a little bit. They have a minor working with them. Phoebe is no longer able to suit up, and they're going to abide by that. That's as far as they take this. I'm going to say something else. Ghostbusters, the premise really worked in the 80s. These shlubby guys trying to get rich off this idea of busting ghosts. They don't really care about busting ghosts. They're just trying to make money. Race Dance and Egon certainly have their heart in the right place. Winston's just trying to get a paycheck and Venkman has absolutely zero interest in the actual ghost busting process. He just wants to make a name for himself and get wealthy. It works in the 80s for a lot of reasons. One, the technology was at the right place. Two, the gritty look of the film really helped enhance what was going on. It gives it this realistic look. Three, the fact that special effects are dated in the movie and they just didn't have the ability to make things larger than life actually helps it. It grounds things a little bit. It feels believable. Now, in modern era, where everybody has smartphones, drones, there's Elon Musk's and all these billionaires, you're going to tell me that there's still this ragtag group of people going around busting ghosts. Everybody knows ghosts are real, and there's no other corporation. There's nobody else doing this. We don't have a smartphone app tracker to tell them where ghosts are. It's just kind of preposterous and it's hard to wrap my head around it. Especially now that Winston Zedmore is back in the mix and he is a multi-millionaire who is building up the ghost busters again. He's got this whole research facility. They're testing different things out. For some reason, the fucking baby StayPuff Marshmallow kids are back. There's so much nostalgia thrown in. I saw someone using the ooze gun from the second movie. Kind of funny. He was in the background, a little tip of the hat. But it just doesn't make any sense. Like this guy's a multi-millionaire and he's renting out this crappy fish building or whatever it is. He's got the kid from the first film as one of the trainees there. I don't even remember the name Lucky, I think. Lucky's there. This character is so generic. Her only defining characteristic now is the cool white dreads she has. That's her character. Lucky in her cool hair. Does nothing in this film, by the way. She just stands around most of the time. She fires the proton pack once and it freezes. Very cool special effect. By the way, I loved that. But this character is just completely generic. The same ghost for the new scientist they introduce. Don't remember his name. Some white guy with glasses. That's his defining characteristic. He has glasses. The entire point of this facility is to introduce some new tech and a new type of ghost which I really liked. The one that can kind of zip around and go into any object and make it a haunted device, a source for it to move around in. I forgot the name of this type of ghost. But it's cool. It's a great idea. And they'll play with this a little bit in a later scene where it's at the library stealing a device that chants out the ritual needed to wake up this evil villain from his enclosure. This ball thing that they have. That scene is pretty fun. I like how it jumps into a garbage bag and it's bouncing around and then it takes off into a book cart and it goes down. And of course we have to have the nod to the ghost librarian again. She's back. But how? How could she possibly be back? Well, what happens is when they put this ball into the new device introduced at the laboratory, this machine has the ability to suck the spirit out to pull it away from its host object. And so that's how they're able to separate these haunted spirits from these devices and put them into their little ghostbuster cages. There's this really creepy one that's kind of stalking around and I kept thinking, oh man, I can't wait till that guy gets out and we have a scene with it. We don't. We never get a scene with it. It's teased multiple times in the film. It's just in the shadows and very ominous. It gets out eventually and nothing happens. What a complete waste. This film feels incredibly edited down. And I understand I'm jumping around like crazy. There's so much going on in this film which is a major problem with the movie itself. There's too much going on. Your brain can't really focus. A lot of it doesn't add up at all. Anyway, when they use this device and they suck out the spirit or attempt to and fail of this enclosure, it causes this. Yeah, you're going to love this. Giant beam of energy to shoot up into the sky. How many times are we going to see the giant beam of fucking energy shoot up into the sky? Here we are again. And this messes up the Ghostbusters capture enclosure device and so it starts to go wild and spirits start to break out. Spirits start to get out. That's why the librarian's back in her spot. And I thought to myself, all right, we've kind of done this before in Ghostbusters 2. Here we are again. All the spirits are out. And this is very much going to be a drastic world fall in franchise situation where at the end the clone girl lets the dinosaurs out to roam free and then they set up the next movie. Oh, we have to get the dinosaurs captured or we're going to have to live with them. In this one, it very much felt like, look at all the ghosts are out. So now we can make a bunch more Ghostbusters movies where they're actually busting ghosts. The containment unit is very much on the fritz, this whole movie. And it was established early on because they're running out of space for all these spirits, all these souls. And it is also established that this new facility has like a freaking ton of them. There's going to be enough space to hold spirits and ghosts and all that shit for millennia, forever. I think Lucky came up with some arbitrary number that it would take seven years to transfer all of them over. I was like, what? Wow. What kind of system are you guys? Are you guys like jarring them up and taking away getting over? Here's another ghost. While plot 45 is happening, we get to the worst one in the film, which is our girl Spangler playing chess in the park at night, which seems like a really terrible idea if you're a 15-year-old in New York going to the park in the dead of night because your family's out busting ghosts and playing chess by yourself. Not an ideal strategy. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. We'll see if it plays out. And it does. She meets up with a ghost named Melody. There's just an angsty ghost named Melody who died in a fire and she's really good at chess because she's been going there playing with herself a lot. That sounded wrong. We're going to move past it. Phoebe's kind of taken by this ghost girl. She's pretty impressed with her. At one point, she's going to give her a tour of the facility. She's going to show her where the ghosts are held. And that was a big mistake because it's revealed after several scenes of these two boringly talking. This ghost girl, by the way, she sucks. She has the worst timing. She for some reason waits. She has long pauses before she responds. I hate her. Anyway, it's revealed she's actually working with Garaka. Garaka! What? That's right. That's right. Why is she working with him? Unclear. Something about being able to see her family again? That stuff was all pretty much over my head. I didn't understand. He's kind of the gatekeeper of this realm that he lives in. It looks miserable in there. Just a shit show, if you ask me. I guess her parents are part of that or he gives her the ability to cross over to the other side. Finally, it was very, very up in the air. It was very George Clooney. But that's not even the dumb part of it. That's fine. Whatever. You want to do the double cross, the double ghost, that's fine. What was annoying was how quickly Phoebe becomes this dipshit, willing to essentially kill herself to just hang out with the ghost and see what it feels like to be a ghost. So she goes to this new facility, puts herself into the machine where she can extract her own soul from her body with an arbitrary two-minute marker, time down. So she has two minutes where she gets to just walk amongst the ghosts. The fuck? What is this? How do you get to this place? I understood she was a little depressed. She was a little bummed out. She couldn't be a ghost buster anymore, which I also found to be complete bullshit. She's the reason they're even doing this to begin with. You're going to tell me that Gary and Callie, the adults, aren't going to find a way for her to join in their reindeer games after all they went through in the last film? Poppycock. Absolute Poppycock. There's no way I don't buy it, but regardless, she's sad, so she decides to extract her own spirit from her body. It makes no sense at all. Absolutely stupid. It is so hard to get on board with this entire section. Also, I went with a buddy and he turned to me and he said, is she gay? I don't know. It was weird. There's such a weird premise. It almost feels like she had to be because she was definitely give her googly eyes and she was very into this chick and maybe she just was enraptured by her coolness. People give in to peer pressure, but it's not like... It's not like Melody really even put this in her head. She didn't say, hey, you should be a ghost. It's great. And let me say, I don't care that she's gay, but I felt like she almost had to be for this to make even a tiny little bit of sense because people will do crazy things for love. And so in that sense, it's really the only way I can wrap my brain around any of this dumb shit. We at one point established that the Proton packs aren't going to work on this new villain. He just freezes them. They need to use copper or iron or something that the packs don't have. So Phoebe lines hers with the materials that she needs in the hopes that it'll work. And yes, of course it works, but we'll get there later. In the meantime, a bunch of other dumb stuff happens that I'm not remembering. And then we get to the final act. Keep in mind, one ghost has been bust. One ghost busted in this entire film. Garaka finally rises to power. How? How does this happen? Well, because Phoebe allowed it to, because of her dumb ass choice, to kind of kill herself, to remove her spirit from her body. It was the... It's the perfect plan, I guess. I don't know. How the fuck do you get to... All right, here's what we need to do. I need to use one of my ghosts that can jump into any item. He's gonna go to the library. He's gonna overhear race stands playing a recording on this device. He's gonna record. He's gonna steal the device. He's gonna bring it back to me. We have part of the plan done. On the other side, I need Melody to convince this girl to fall in love with her, go to this facility that I know about that has a machine that will extract her from her body, will then use that recording, will make her say what's on it, and then bingo, bingo, bongo, penis. I'm out of my device. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. He's out, but Lucky's there to save the day. Again, we're hiring 16, 17, 18-year-olds to work at this facility. We don't have grown ass adults that maybe would be better suited to put on these highly dangerous proton packs with nuclear reactors in them and to test out these experimental things. Whatever, we're moving past it. We got Lucky. Lucky's in the house and she has a proton pack. He freezes it. She starts to freeze up, but that's it. He doesn't kill her for some reason. I don't know why. He kills just arbitrarily. So yeah, he leaves. He's going to start freezing everything over. Let it go. Let it go. We get the beach scene where ice is breaking up. People are freezing over, I think. I'm not sure we see... We probably see people freeze. We have to because it's on the beach. Another thing that was just like... This is just an observation. But on the merry-go-round, when they're going around in a circle slowly, it starts to seal up, which felt weird to me because none of the people on the ride are getting cold. They're still very much enjoying themselves when the ride slowly stops. The ride would only stop though if it got really cold and froze up the instrumentation. They should also be really fucking cold at that point. But whatever. Just an observation. Thankfully for Phoebe, there's other Ghostbusters willing to lend a hand, including Potts. That's right. Potts is suiting up this time, baby. And he puts on the suit. Bill Murray's back finally. He's barely in this picture. He's in it a little earlier. And again, at the end, perhaps I could be of assistance. He walks up. We have all the Ghostbusters. Rais in uniform. Winston throws it on. This is going to be an epic final battle. We got the family of Spanglers. We got the old dogs coming out of retirement for one last fight. And we're going to square off against the new big bad Garaka. While this is happening upstairs in the firehouse, Phoebe's right downstairs chatting with Ghostgirl again. They talk forever during the battle upstairs. They're not really doing much of anything. They're just kind of hanging out while this shit is going down upstairs. The Ghostbusters don't do anything. They shoot the Proton Packs one time and they're all frozen. That's it. That's all they do. They suit up to do nothing. They don't bust a single Ghost. Oh, sweet. Annie Potts suits up. I can't wait to see what. And she's frozen. Oh, Bill Murray's back to kick some enemies frozen. Why release all the Ghosts again if you're not going to even go after them? Well, I think, again, it's because they're doing Jurassic World Fallen franchise and they're just setting up another one so they can go after some of these iconic Ghosts from the past. Final Act takes place. Phoebe uses her Magic Proton Pack with the new materials. Medeem, who's been practicing moving a flame onto a candle for the entire film, now can throw a full bore fireball because Ghost Girl gave him her match that was in her stupid matchstick thing because she turns the page and says, you know what? I screwed up. I'm going to be your friend again. Sorry about everything. This was dumb. He throws the Hadouken fireball. Phoebe throws him in the trap. Game over. That's it. He really puts up no fight at all. It was incredibly lame and in the most mind-boggling ending ever. They walk outside and half the city's there cheering them on. Good job, Ghostbusters. Yay, Ghostbusters. What? How did they even know this fight was going down? How are these people not depressed and sad or frozen to death? We see no bodies. We see no one frozen. They act like nothing happened at all. It's just skit-a-dan, bam, bam, bam. Da-da-da-da-ding, ding, ding, ding. Stupid. And that's it. Ghostbusters frozen franchise. We end with the Spanglers riding off into the sunset after the ghost thing again. Trevor is in the movie again. He's like, hey, I'm here still. Stranger things ended up rapping on filming so I could be in this again. I forgot podcast is in this one. I didn't mind podcast in the last movie. He annoyed the shit out of me in this film. I just found him to be incredibly annoying. But whatever. We don't need to go into podcast hate. Probably a sweet kid, a sweet actor. It just didn't like the character and how he's smashing things with a mallet. And those are my thoughts on the film. Overall, not a fan. Maybe you liked it more. I'm sure I missed a bunch of stuff. I apologize, 1,000%. There was so much going on. It's such a clusterfuck. It was clearly edited way down. This was probably originally a four-hour movie. And they're like, oh, God, we have to cut some corners here. We have to make this a lot shorter. And I appreciate that because if this was any longer, what a miserable experience. There's no music at all. The music is so lifeless. There's such a lack of energy to any of it. It's so humdrum all around. When the Ghostbusters theme finally kicks in when the credits start to roll, I was so taken aback. Like, oh, my God, music. What is this? What's going on? Some of the ideas were fun. Like I said, I like the new types of ghosts. I really like that they introduced the drone trap. And they also had the Hot Wheels racer going on the ground. That was all fun. Again, that was right at the beginning of the film. But all the new things, the adding like X-Men abilities to some of the characters, the new villain being incredibly lame, the whole frozen thing, not really being anything at all. And apparently they didn't have any consequences because the city was all up in arms happy. Like, yay, we did it, Ghostbusters. The fact that they lost their proton packs again, they had them taken from them, only to just have a whole nother set from Winston the next day. Nothing really mattered at all. It was all for nothing. Yeah, that's right. Peck at one point shuts the Ghostbusters down again. But it doesn't matter because like literally the next day they get more packs and they go fight ghosts. It's not like Ghostbusters 2 where things go really bad and then they reinstate them because they have no choice. Just, there's so much shit in this movie. But anyway, if you liked it, you liked it. That's great. I'm checked out of this franchise, kind of like I'm checked out of the Jurassic Park franchise and the Star Wars and Alien and all that stuff. It's just so, it's such a product now. There's no life to it anymore. But let me know your thoughts. Are you a fan? Did you not like it either? Leave a comment, let me know. Please, again, subscribe if you like hearing a guy just talk just off the cuff about films that he likes and doesn't like. Oh, also if you really enjoyed this, there's a super thanks where you can leave five bucks, ten bucks, whatever you want to say. Hey, Adam, love the video. Thanks, man, for the honesty. I appreciate it. Or think about becoming a patron at patreon.com. Slash Adam does movies. 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