'Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire' review: Nostalgia runneth cold in ghostbusted series entry

Coherence isn't a strong suit of "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire," a nostalgia-driven franchise entry which isn't sure what's going to stick, so it keeps throwing things at the wall to see what does.

It picks up after 2021's "Ghostbusters: Afterlife," which both introduced a new crew of Ghostbusters and brought back the original 1984 squad for another spin around the block. That left us with three generations of characters: teenagers Trevor and Phoebe Spengler (Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace), middle age couple Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) and Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon), and old timers Ray Stantz (Dan Akroyd) and Dr. Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson). That's not to mention a handful of side characters, including one named Podcast (Logan Kim), as well as Bill Murray's Dr. Peter Venkman, who seems to get paid by the scene so he comes around a little less frequently than everybody else.

In "Frozen Empire," there are parenting issues to sort through, as Gary struggles with being less like a buddy and more like a dad (or a stepdad, or whatever) to Callie's two children. There's also a whole bunch of ghost hullabaloo, including a trans-dimensional same-sex love story, and that's before we even get to the whole "Frozen Empire" of the title, and a villain who only shows up in the last 20 or so minutes. Hey pal, there's a lot going on here, mind if you wait your turn?

It adds up to a whole lot of not much, but there's plenty of it to go around. "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" mostly trades on goodwill for the 40-year-old series, which has produced five movies, three of them in the last eight years. (Don't bother mentioning 2016's female-led "Ghostbusters," no one else is.) It's mildly amusing and won't leave viewers with anything much to ponder, aside from the mechanics of shoehorning of all those plotlines into one amorphous body in an effort to try to appeal to as broad a body of viewers as possible. More than anything, this is a study in franchise management in 2024.

"Frozen Empire" opens with a big action sequence, set in the streets of New York City, which is likely to give viewers motion sickness. The Spenglers (and Gary, cracking wise as always) are careening through the city in their Ghostbustermobile, chasing after the flying "Hells Kitchen Sewer Dragon," which is introduced like we're all supposed to know what that is. The sequence serves as a showcase for all the Ghostbusters' cool new and semi-new gadgets — a robo door-seat thing that extends outside the vehicle, a mini street rover — each of which are rolled out one-by-one, like toys being unwrapped on Christmas morning. Hey look, they have a drone-type device that catches ghosts in mid-air! (Couldn't they have just used that one first?)

There are issues. First off, after capturing the ghost, they bring it back to HQ and their storage is almost at full ghost capacity. On the personnel front, young genius Phoebe wants more responsibility — she wants to be a fully vested buster of ghosts — and she's told she's too young. Being a teen still sucks.

Alone in a park one night, Phoebe sits down to play chess and she's joined by Melody (Emily Alyn Lind, "Doctor Sleep"), a pouty Gen-Z spectre with a thing for fire. They identify the loneliness in each other, and through their mutual sense of outsidership, they form a bond. Or maybe Melody is just weaponizing Melody's sense of alienation and using it against her for nefarious reasons? Ghosts: you can't trust 'em, that's why you gotta bust 'em.

Meanwhile Kumail Nanjiani, who early in his career performed a great bit pointing out the absurdity of the ghost logo holding up a two with his fingers in 1989's "Ghostbusters II" ("How did they know they were in a sequel?"), joins the cast as Nadeem Razmaadi, a slacker who, while peddling his grandmother's goods, finds an ancient relic that unlocks all manner of ghostly unholiness. And New York City, which just can't catch a break from these paranormal disasters (five in 40 years!), suddenly has another one on its hands.

There's a misstep with a poorly conceived suicide-adjacent stunt with Phoebe which doesn't fit tonally, conceptually or otherwise into the film's blueprint. So why's it here? Elsewhere, "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" seems content to just exist, with casting prioritized ("Who can we get?") above a screenplay ("What should we have them do?"). Co-writer and director Gil Kenan doesn't so much shepherd a story as he does manage the "Ghostbusters" brand for 115 minutes. We get a few winks, a few ghosts, and that's about it. And then it's gone, in a poof, as if it was never even there.

agraham@detroitnews.com

'Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire'

GRADE: C

Rated PG-13: for supernatural action/violence, language and suggestive references

Running time: 115 minutes

In theaters