_TL;DR: On my way out of the theater I saw a dad talking to his 6/7 year-old son: "Which one did you like better? The one we watched this morning at home [the original "Ghostbusters"] or this one?" The boy replied without hesitation: "I liked the one at home more."_

An exemplary example of corporate studio cowardice, _Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire_ is an unbalanced morass shaped into the form of a movie that only vaguely resembles the original. Most frustrating: Even though it's a confounding pastiche, buried underneath the cringe-worthy fan service, vapid dialogue, absurd plot holes, and pointless characters there were glimpses of a film that could have stood up to the 1984 classic, but if this movie shows us anything, it's that studios today would never, ever greenlight something as original and visionary as Ivan Reitman's masterpiece.

Instead of a comedy with sprinklings of sci-fi, horror, and suspense, this _Ghostbusters_ feels like a bunch of scenes from each those different genres shoehorned together into something that could appeal to little kids while tugging at the nostalgic heartstrings of their parents. The result is cynical dreck. Silly sight gags bump up against cheap jump scares which transition into gross out humor. Instead of trying to build something unique, something with a singular vision, they took the genre classifications of the original and inserted elements of each one. It's paint-by-numbers movie making... and it stinks.

Mckenna Grace is the heart of the story, and her Phoebe Spengler is the only character who goes through a meaningful story arc. (With the possible exception of Paul Rudd's Gary, but his story gets so little screen time that it's all but disqualifying.) She actually gives a pretty good performance, and the filmmakers could have used her journey to explore lots of ideas- things like the nature of reality and the coherence of the soul. There was even a chance to [spoiler]center a queer character in a touching way[/spoiler], but nothing goes beyond heavy inference, or it is explained away with technobabble. And as any _Star Trek_ fan will attest, when technobabble is used as an emotional escape hatch instead of a plot device, everything around it crumbles.

Even the villain was a wasted opportunity. The O.G. _Ghostbusters_ villain, Gozer, was a Sumerian god. This new one is also a god of the same era. That's a rich vein to explore. Are the Ghostbusters modern incarnations of ancient warriors who helped rid the world of transdimensional beings in the earliest days of civilization? It's an idea that gets a fleeting mention (though only in relation to a secondary character), but, like all the other big ideas, is never explored. Instead of world-building we get a revisit to the New York Public Library and a meaningless bit of fan service.

_Ghostbusters: Afterlife_ was a promising, if flawed, kick-start of the franchise. I'd hoped that with a return to New York and more involvement by one of the original's writers we'd get something at least marginally as entertaining as the first two of the series. I guess that I'll just keep on hoping.