Berlin – 555-2368: The Ghostbusters of the 80s could be reached at this phone number. The line was dead for decades, but now life is returning to the old New York fire station. Literally: While the first part of the modern “Ghostbusters” series took place in the country in the US state of Oklahoma, the second part “Frozen Empire” goes back to the metropolis with a population of millions.
There, the Sprengler family together frees the city of larger and smaller ghosts. Mother Callie (Carrie Coon) and her partner Mr. Grooberson (Paul Rudd) are probably the only parents who can convince their teenagers Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) to go on trips together. Admittedly, very few parents have fast chases in the Ecto-1 to offer, complete with cool overalls and Proton weapons.
Generational teamwork
Then a mysterious ancient sphere appears, with an unpredictable danger lurking inside. In order to save the planet from sinking into eternal ice, the family gets help: not from just anyone, but from the original Ghostbusters! Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) have left the action-packed missions behind them, but retirement is out of the question.
While the three only had small cameos in the first part of the modern series, this time the filmmakers seem to have listened to fan feedback and integrated them firmly into the plot. In this way, experimenting, solving puzzles and chasing ghosts becomes a real teamwork between the generations.
Since the fourth Ghostbusters member Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) has died, the team receives support from the likeable Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts). The filmmakers only made the decision to allow the Ghostbusters’ former secretary to go ghost hunting herself during filming, says actress Annie Potts in an interview. “I’ve been waiting for this for 40 years! It was super exciting!” she said happily.
Bill Murray wasn’t too keen on slipping into the iconic jumpsuit with a proton backpack. “Carrying a backpack used to be tiring – now it’s torture,” he said with a smile in an interview.
In addition to the well-known faces, fans can look forward to many other elements from the earlier films. For example, Slimer has taken up residence in the attic of the fire station. However, the film also contains many new characters, such as the somewhat lost-seeming Nadeem Razmaadi (Kumail Nanjiani), who has to take on his family’s great inheritance, or the ghost of a woman burned alive (Emily Alyn Lind), who only seems less dangerous at first glance acts than all the other creatures.
But even the scariest moments are lightened up by a lot of humor, as is typical for Ghostbusters. “We wanted to bring the looseness and fearlessness of the series into this film,” said director Gil Kenan, who has previously primarily worked in the horror and thriller genre (“Monster House,” “Poltergeist”). However, together with Jason Reitman he also wrote the script for the first modern “Ghostbusters” film “Legacy”.
After a failed remake of the classic film under Paul Feig in 2016, it was the Reitman-Kenan duo who helped the material regain new popularity, at that time still directed by Reitman. His father Ivan, who directed the very first Ghostbusters film in 1984, worked on “Legacy” as a producer.
After Ivan Reitman’s death in 2022, Jason once again followed in his father’s footsteps as producer for “Frozen Empire”, but handed over the direction to Kenan. “I couldn’t trust Gil anymore,” Reitman said in an interview, adding, “I never felt like Ghostbusters was mine. And I think my father saw it the same way. Ghostbusters belongs to all of us.”
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, USA 2024, 114 min., FSK ages 12+, by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, with Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts