Tag: Kumail Nanjiani

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Review: Too Many Characters Creates a Scattered Film.

I quite enjoyed the 2021 Ghostbusters reboot, Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
It brought a smile to my face, as it lovingly paid tribute to what came before, while paving a road for a new set of characters.
After watching the sequel, however, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, I can say that it was lacking a lot of that charm.
Directed by Gil Kenan, and written by him and Jason Reitman, Frozen Empire picks up three years after Afterlife.
The Spengler family has now taken on the role of the Ghostbusters in New York, with the original team helping them out.
After being sold a mysterious orb, the team slowly begins to realize it holds a powerful spirit, capable of freezing the world. 

The ice age comes to New York in Frozen Empire.

And so, the Ghostbusters, new and old, have to unite to take on this latest threat.
This, naturally, means there are a lot of characters to follow in this movie, which is Frozen Empire’s biggest problem.
Some of these characters do have good storylines, don’t get me wrong.
Just like in Afterlife, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) has the best story, with her befriending a ghost girl, and Paul Rudd is still a lot of fun as Gary.
Kumail Nanjiani also has a fun presence, and his character received most of the few laughs from the audience I saw the film with.
But there are just simply too many characters to follow in this movie, resulting in many of them having next to no story and thus feeling entirely unnecessary.
Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), Lucky (Celeste O’Connor), and Podcast (Logan Kim) all just feel like they are there because they were in Afterlife. 

If half the cast from the previous movie had not returned, then I feel like Frozen Empire’s plot could have been more succinct.

As for the original Ghostbusters, while their return at the end of Afterlife was a well-done moment of fan service, some of them just feel like they are here to whip up nostalgia, most notably Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman. 
Having all of these characters to follow, many of them with pointless storylines or no storylines at all, makes the film quite jumbled.
This is not to say my opinion of Frozen Empire is entirely negative, though.
The villain feels unique, even if it does suffer a bit from the trope of standing around too much, giving the heroes time to fight back.

The antagonist at least feels somewhat intimidating.

There were some good storylines, like with the already mentioned Phoebe, Gary and Nadeem.
There were also a couple good laughs here and there, even if a lot of the jokes did miss the mark.
Overall, I would say Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a fine movie.
It is one you can watch to pass the time for a bit.
Certainly not as good as Afterlife but thankfully nowhere near as bad as Ghostbusters 2016.

Eternals Review: This Should Have Been a Series.

A common criticism I have heard of the latest film in the MCU, Eternals, is that it would have worked better as a series.
Well, after watching the film, I can wholeheartedly say that I agree with this sentiment. 
Directed by Chloé Zhao, the film follows the titular Eternals, immortal superpowered beings, created by the Celestial Arishem to defend earth from monsters known as the Deviants.
They consist of Sersi (Gemma Chan), Ikaris (Richard Madden), Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), Sprite (Lia McHugh), Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), Druig (Barry Keoghan), Thena (Angelena Jolie), Gilgamesh (Don Lee), Makarri (Lauren Ridloff), and Ajak (Salma Hayak).
Yes, that is 10 Eternals you have to keep track of.

Eternals has way too many characters for a single movie where they are all introduced.

This would not be a problem if Eternals was like an Avengers movie, with each of the Eternals having their own solo film, so you knew who they were when they came together for this film.
It would also not be a problem if, as much of the criticism has stated, Eternals was a show instead.
But Eternals is neither of these things.
This is a two and half hour movie that introduces ten super heroes in quick succession and expects us to care about all of them, even when some of them have zero character development.
The worst example of this is Ridloff’s Makkari.
We know exactly three things about her character, she’s deaf, she has super speed, and sort of has a thing going on with Druig.
That’s it.
There is nothing else to her as a character because the film just does not focus on her because it spends time trying to make you care about the other Eternals, most of which do not have the proper screen time to make us care about them either. 

Many characters in the Eternals suffer from a lack of development but Makkari suffers the most by far.

To be fair, there are a few of the Eternals I did come to care about, like Phastos, Druig and Thena.
However, even though I did like them, this was nowhere near the amount of care that it could have been because, again, there were too many characters to focus on.
If they were so deadset on Eternals being a movie then they should have cut back on the characters, so they could get enough development that we as the audience would care about all of them.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the characters that suffer in this movie but also the plot, with numerous side stories just not fitting in.
The biggest of these is the Deviant storyline, which starts off important but, by the end, I wondered why it was still even a part of the narrative.
Then there’s Kit Harrington’s role, which is more of a teaser for future MCU films than anything else.
My final criticism is that there’s parts of this movie that were unintentionally funny.
I remember one point in the film when a background character said something so deadpan, only to die immediately after saying it, and this made me burst into laughter, which was certainly not the reaction Zhao wanted.
Although, I will say that while there are some bits that are unintentionally funny, there’s also some bits of good intentional humor as well, mostly with Kugo and his valet, Karun (Harish Patel).
Along with this, I did like some of the twists and turns the story took.
The acting across the board was also pretty good.

I did like where the story took Ikaris’ character.

There was a lot of potential with Eternals.
It’s just that this potential was crushed under the weight of what felt like a street performer juggling too many characters and plot points.
Eternals would have been better as a series.
If it had been one, it would have given enough time for all of the characters to be properly developed, side stories could be fleshed out without feeling pointless, and it might have just worked out into a cohesive narrative.
Instead, what we got was easily one of the MCU’s weakest films.
Hopefully, future Eternals films will improve on this.