Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review.
Too many threads can’t prevent Tim Burton’s long-awaited sequel from being his best movie in a while.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Directed by Tim Burton
Screenplay by Alfed Gough and Miles Millar
Starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Review
It’s been a long 36 years since Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice hit theaters. A sequel has been talked about for pretty much as long. The first concept, Beetlejuice in Love, never made it past the first draft stage. The oft-discussed Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian never came to fruition despite several false starts. Flash forward to 2024…and the perfectly titled Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is finally here. It reunited Burton with a trio of actors from the first film, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, and brings aboard the star of his hit Netflix show Wednesday, Jenna Ortega.
The story takes place following the death of Charles Deetz. The actor who played him wasn’t brought back for reasons we won’t get into here…but good riddance to him. Unfortunately, this is a Beetlejuice movie, so death is never quite the end. The character appears in one of the movie’s many storylines…but Burton makes an inspired choice in portraying him. We learn in an animated flashback that Charles died when a shark jumped out of the water and took his top half with him. The rest of the body shambles through the afterlife throughout Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. If it had to be done…this was a good way to do it.
The returning actors are all in fine form. Keaton’s titular character has always been the strangest of his career. Time hasn’t slowed down his commitment to the bit. It’s another homerun go for broke performance by Keaton in the role. O’Hara has a lot more to do this time around. She’s always excellent. This is no different. Ryder has the toughest job here. She has to figure out what a character like Lydia Deetz is three and a half decades later. She makes what’s probably the right call…even if it’s the least interesting. Lydia would stay true to who she is, after all. It feels strange watching Ryder reinhabit a character so long after with such little growth…but wasn’t the point in the original that Lydia knew who she was anyway?
There are too many storylines in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to do them all justice here. Unfortunately, that’s true of the movie itself as well. What seem like major plotlines are consistently placed on the backburner and then find themselves ended abruptly. It can be difficult to tell what’s going to matter enough to pay off in the end. What’s interesting about the approach, however, is that the movie does do a good job of ending the less meaningful stories in a way that adds to the bigger ones. Entire subplots are sacrificed in service of moving characters to where they need to be for the grand finale.
The best way to describe that finale is…messy. Several things converge…most are quickly ushered away in less than satisfying fashion. Monica Bellucci plays Beetlejuice’s ex-wife Delores…a soul sucker who can kill the dead. She appears on screen before we even get to the man himself. It leads us to believe her quest to find Beetlejuice is a major plotline. It isn’t. Long stretches of time pass between appearances. When she finally makes her way to the climax…she exits just as quickly. A similar fate awaits Willem Dafoe’s comedic movie star turned afterlife detective. They both have good moments…and ultimately there wasn’t much point to either’s paths.
Ortega, of course, plays Lydia’s daughter Astrid. They have some family things to work through. Things that are further complicated by her mother’s boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux). Astrid’s father died long before this story begins…and it’s caused a rift in her relationship with Lydia. Astrid also finds a love interest that the movie, frankly, doesn’t have a lot of time for. It leads to something more interesting…but again, sometimes those interesting threads are simply woven into where the story wants to go instead of getting the time to reach a more interesting conclusion.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice certainly can’t be labeled a lazy sequel. If anything, its biggest issue comes from trying to do too much. Interesting characters and their stories get shortchanged too often. It does create some of the manic storytelling that you want in a sequel to Beetlejuice…but that energy doesn’t always land in the right way. An extended rendition of MacArthur Park starts out fun…but the joke goes on far too long to be funny. You almost find yourself thinking of how that time could have been used on three or four other things that needed to be fleshed out. Instead…we watch a wedding party lip-sync for an uncomfortable amount of time.
Was the long wait for a Beetlejuice sequel worth it? It’s an unfair question. How much of that time did anyone really spend anxiously awaiting it? It’s more like a decent walk down memory lane. It can’t recapture all the magic…but Burton, Keaton and company give it their all. That’s bound to please Burton fans. Too many Dumbo’s, Dark Shadows’, Alce in Wonderland’s, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s, Planet of the Apes’ and Sleepy Hollow’s have plagued the director’s filmography in the last few decades.
Somewhere along the way Burton’s style and overreliance on Johnny Depp made his work feel like a parody of itself. 2024 is a long way from his 1994 masterpiece Ed Wood…a movie it’s impossible to believe he could make now. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finally provides him with a live action canvas to display some of the fun he’s had with his animated projects like Frankenweenie and Corpse Bride. And really…isn’t that the Tim Burton we really want? Worth the wait? Depending on how long you’ve been waiting for this kind of Burton movie…Absolutely.
Scare Value
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice packs in a lot of stuff. Some is more important than others…and things aren’t laid out in a way where it is obvious to tell what’s going to matter and what will be abruptly dropped at a moment’s notice. The clever thing about all of those smaller threads is how they are woven into the bigger ones. They exist to get things into position for the moments that really count. It can be a bit frustrating…but it’s usually entertaining enough. Compared to Burton’s films of the last few decades…that’s a win.
3/5
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