Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Review - 4 Ups & 6 Downs
Downs...
6. Too Many Characters & Subplots
Frozen Empire commits the common blockbuster sin of overstuffing itself with far too many characters and storylines, in turn spreading itself too thinly across its already overegged 115-minute runtime.
Beyond reuniting the original Ghostbusters with Egon's family introduced in Afterlife, forgettable, one-note characters like Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky (Celeste O'Connor) are back, while a number of new heroes are introduced, including Kumail Nanjiani's incredibly perfunctory quasi-sidekick Nadeem Razmaadi.
And so, by the time the climax rolls around, there are almost a dozen people teaming up to battle the Big Bad, but when anyone with even a cursory link to the O.G. 'Busters can apparently join the team, some of their specialness becomes lost.
Add to this a strained attempt to deepen the series' supernatural mythology and an overloaded subplot in which Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) gets the hots for a ghostly teenage girl, Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), and it's painfully clear that the script needed another draft to cut the dead weight away.