Dan Akroyd | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

One would have thought, that the producers and owners of the Ghostbusters franchise that started in 1984 – 40 years ago, would have learned from the low ratings of the last movie “Ghostbusters: Afterlife”, released in late 2021 that it was time to try and save this franchise before it was too late. Unfortunately the latest, and hopefully last installment, “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” is even worse than the last film.

What is most tragic is that everybody knows that the first Ghostbusters movie and the second one, released in 1989 were both good movies. Given that the screenwriters and producers had two solid templates to work from, it makes no sense that the last two movies have been so bad. The first problem is that both these films are almost completely devoid of any humor, which is the number one reason why the first two movies worked so well. Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd were very funny in the first two installments, but in these last two sequels, Murray is rarely in either movie and both Akroyd and Murray are never funny. In the case of Akryod and Murray, the obvious solution would be to allow them to create their own lines using improvisation; this alone would have made this latest bad Ghostbusters movie much better.

The other problem is the scene-to-scene jumping without any connections between the last scene or enough explanation to satisfactorily describe why anything is happening. Another problem is that a great deal of these almost 2 hours are very boring and I remember looking at my watch too many times, hoping that this mostly bad experience would soon be over.

The cast includes the same actors from the last sequel, who are the relatives of Dr. Egon Spengler, played by the late Harold Ramis, including Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, and Mckenna Grace, with new cast members Kumail Nanjiani and Patton Oswalt. For the second time in a row, the screenwriters and director once again made the normally excellent comedic actor Paul Rudd boring.

Due to the poor reviews in 2021 for the last Ghostbusters movie, I am surprised that they made a second attempt so soon. Most likely the producers thought that because of the guaranteed built in audience, this latest film will still make money, no matter how bad it is. Unfortunately they may be right about this, which is why so many bad sequels are made.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie is a too high 46% with my rating only 20% and a big – miss this one and see the first two movies instead recommendation.

Just like all movie franchises, its all about the money and not screwing up what made the original movies as good as they were. Ghostbusters was released in 1984, Ghostbusters 2 was released in 1989. One of the best things about these two movies was their humor, mostly from the deadpan comments and subtle comedy of Bill Murray. Unfortunately, the new “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” is almost bereft of all humor, once again in favor of special effects, mostly at the end. I was surprised at how slow and boring this movie was in too many areas, aside from missing the most important comedy ingredient. In 2016 a new idea in the Ghostbusters franchise was attempted with an all female cast starring Kate McKinnon and Melissa McCarthy. At least this movie did not forget to at least try to continue the comedy tradition, but was only at best an average film.

This story starts in the present day, with Callie, the daughter of Dr. Egon Spengler, played by the late Harold Ramis, broke and evicted from her home with her 2 kids, Phoebe and Trevor. Spengler’s daughter Callie then inherits the about to-fall down-farm of her late father, starting the story of a scientist who for over 30 years was still trying to trap ghosts rather than being a farmer.

One possible source of humor that was missed in this story was Paul Rudd, who plays the science teacher of Phoebe played by Mckenna Grace. Rudd has no funny scenes in this movie, none. Considering Rudd has always been funny in just about all his movies, it must have taken some doing to squelch out any sign of humor in all of his scenes. We all know that the science behind this Ghostbusters idea is ridiculous, so in order to make this all work, the audience needs comedy to make fun of the whole insane idea of trapping dangerous ghosts into tiny boxes using laser guns.

The other idea here was to use young kids to continue this franchise, with one of the actors from the Netflix “Stranger Things” series, Finn Wolfhard along with Mckenna Grace and newcomer
Logan Kim – who calls himself podcast, for reasons that make no sense and not really funny. This idea of this new young cast, might save this franchise but only if the next one in the series is much better than this installment. The original Ghostbuster cast, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and Ernie Hudson does make an appearance at the end of this movie, along with a visage of Harold Ramis – but this is not nearly enough to save what is a below average film.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Ghostbusters: Afterlife are a low 61% and this time around I agree with the critics and cannot recommend this movie.