It’s impossible to do, but I try not to bring too much baggage to a movie. With that in mind, I’ve been pretty clear on not having much faith in the prospect of a Beetlejuice sequel for reasons that felt quite clear. Simply put, one doesn’t easily capture lightning in a bottle twice. That said, I still approached Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with as open a mind as I could. After all, while director Tim Burton’s name isn’t as white-hot as it used to be, his sensibilities are still enough of a draw, and the prospect of seeing him run wild with his imagination using an established IP (the only way to get him this high of a budget to play with these days) could ideally amount to something visually interesting at the very least. Well, the fortunate thing is how Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t quite amount to a desperate nostalgia play as I thought it might. At its best, it combines macabre humor with tremendous production design for a number of fun scenes. The problem is…well, everything else. Overstuffed with plot and characters, poorly paced, and lacking in much interest in the world it expands upon, there’s undoubtedly plenty of surface value in what’s been delivered, but otherwise, this is a pretty shallow grave.
Set 36 years after the first film (in the real world, that’s tied with Top Gun: Maverick), Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is now using her ability to see ghosts as a means to host a haunted house show. When she hears news that her father has died, she heads back to her home in Winter River, Connecticut, along with her eccentric stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), her estranged teen daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), and her producer/boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux). For the record, the now-deceased father, Charles Deetz, is not reprised by Jeffrey Jones for very clear reasons, but among the film’s cleverer gags, Charles has a more notable presence in this film than one may expect.
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The issue I tend to have with the less successful long-in-development sequels is a lack of real effort to do more than just play the hits, which is a way to narratively undercut the characters. These can be films that set up the logic that in order to make an audience member happy, the characters they presumably enjoy must be forced to devolve from where we last saw them. Instead of seeing how they’ve prospered based on the lessons learned in the first iteration, they are shoved back into a familiar status quo, wearing the same clothes, having the same haircuts, and repeating the same lines. There is some of that in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, especially if you look at the structure of this film, but to its credit, it tries to stray away.
With a lack of audience surrogates Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin from the original, we instead focus on Lydia and Astrid, for the most part. Things become complicated when Lydia starts feeling the presence of Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) once again, knowing that nothing good can come from this. Meanwhile, Astrid’s own issues with her family lead her on a different journey, which eventually places her in the afterlife, where she’ll need to be rescued.
It’s a good thing this film is an irreverent comedy, as the notion of Lydia’s childhood coming back to (literally) haunt her would be used as a metaphor for trauma in any other movie. Here, the film doesn’t really have much to say about anything (more or less lining up with the first), and that’s not a detriment. Still, one does hope the off-kilter atmosphere and other directorial choices at least mean that getting these characters more involved with this world will lead to more ridiculous fun. Well, it comes in spurts, but what got to me was how plodding it felt between some of the more outlandish moments. The original film is a tight 90 minutes (with credits) and is full of zippy energy. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, despite the efforts of some of the cast, gets so bogged down in establishing new characters and repeating the same setups and punchlines that it makes it very clear to me that writers Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith are primarily to blame for what’s not working here.
Burton, for his part, seems to be relishing the opportunity to be involved in this kind of production. While I can’t say he feels any more energized than he was while working on Dumbo or Wednesday, it does feel like Burton’s holding onto the same spirit that suggests he’s knowingly part of a system, yet game to tell stories that are somewhat critical of that system. Granted, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is also about to be one of the biggest box office hits of the year, complete with merchandising found everywhere, so it’s hard to say Burton’s getting the best of “the Man.” Still, even when this film rhymes hardest with the original, many goofy practical effects, settings, costumes, and makeup designs signal a filmmaker attempting to show his auteurist voice.
However, it really is the way this film jampacks itself with so much stuff that gets in the way of making it more engaging. Rather than keep it simple, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice also introduces Monica Bellucci as a soul-sucking ex-wife wanting revenge on Betelgeuse, Willem Dafoe as a ghost detective who was once a B-movie action star, a love interest for Astrid (Arthur Conti), let alone the work going into Theroux’s exhausted performance as an influencer-obsessed cretin. It’s a lot, yet this film has no real idea of what to do with most of these things once the key elements about them are put on display. Honestly, the whiplash that occurs from the languid middle section of the film to the race-to-the-finish-line climax makes me wonder how this was the script the principals from the original finally said “yes” to.
Of course, this leaves Michael Keaton to ideally save the day, and what else can I say about his work here? He’s excellent – a bit slower in his older age, meaning the manic energy doesn’t feel so spontaneous. However, the character remains a gross jerk with the right amount of screen time. Betelgeuse famously only appears for 17 minutes in the original film. I’d be hard-pressed to say he’s in this sequel for anything over 20. That said, if you thought “the ghost with the most” had any new agenda on his mind, you’d be mistaken. He pines for Lydia still, for whatever reason, and the film enters its most reverential moments once they somehow find themselves in front of an alter again.
There may not be a lack of imagination from a production standpoint, but in terms of storytelling, it feels quite poor. Having lost the edge that made Lydia stand out, Ryder doesn’t deliver much that extends beyond the cliché of the “now she’s a mom” character. Ortega more-or-less reacts to the wild things around her. This just leaves the film to cater toward its spirit world stuff, which is either left in the background for generous periods or arrives with little more than sight gags that are well done but ultimately meaningless. I’m glad there seems to be a cross-generational appeal for Beetlejuice, but there’s got to be more to the afterlife as far as selling a sequel that feels meaningful in any way.
I was happy not to loathe Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but that’s not the sort of praise I would have liked to have for the film. Yes, it looks great, and the actors are putting in the effort, specifically Keaton, O’Hara, Dafoe, and an underused Bellucci. Still, it amounts to a film that wanted to fit a whole lot of Burton-shaped clowns into too small of a vehicle for their nonsense. Yes, that’s better than a beat-for-beat redo (though this film’s big sing-a-long/dance number did nothing for me), but the movie still comes up lacking. Perhaps the next time Burton and crew consult the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, they can pull out more than just a nice-lookin’ model.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opens in theaters and IMAX on September 6, 2024.
