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An aged and beloved star back in their signature role; a young bright-eyed ingénue ready to carry the torch (and IP) forward into the next generation; and a sequel that arrives about 20 years after most folks stopped seriously hoping it would ever come.
Yes, we are acutely familiar with the“legacy sequel” in all its nostalgic ebullience and emptiness (sometimes in the same film). And at a glance Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, and Winona Ryder returning to the ink black well for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice seems like it would be more of the same: a chance for old favorites to retread the macabre magic they captured 36 years ago by doing it all again. Yet for both better and worse, the most mischievous thing about Beetlejuice 2 is that it is not strictly a rehash or closet remake of its predecessor. This is in fact what sequels were once supposed to be—big gaudy swings to one-up and expand on the original.
While it definitely does not surpass the 1988 film (few movies do), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice takes what was once a domestic comedy about odd couples, and the odder demon they kept in the attic upstairs, and transforms it into a vibrant collage of ghastly greens, gloomy blues, and a real gratuitous amount of black and white stripes. It’s a miniature odyssey into the afterlife and its bureaucracy of the undead. And if you thought the DMV vibes on the other side looked hellish before, just wait until you see that these spooksters also turn the calming tunnel of light leading toward Heaven into… Friday night on the MTA.
The garishness and goofiness on display in the mise en scène, if not the storytelling, is proof Burton’s imagination for campy mayhem can still be stirred, even if he remains seemingly unable or uninterested in channeling it into a coherent narrative. But for audiences wanting a dose of Halloween fun, we doubt even that will matter given how giddy the movie is whenever Keaton is onscreen to prove he never lost a step since he first burst out of a six-foot hole in the ground. The Juice might be a little older, but he is still an electrifying live-wire whenever the film’s script gets out of the way and lets him rip.
Unfortunately, there is a hefty amount of table-setting during the first act of the 104-minute running time. Most of it involves the revelation that Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) has surprisingly become a television star and does for a living what she once rolled her eyes about her parents attempting: cashing in on ghosts and the supernatural. As the star of a cable ghost hunting series, Lydia is unhappy while being pushed further into the commercial world by her producer and would-be fiancé Rory (Justin Theroux). She also recognizes she’s growing ever more estranged from her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega).
Yet after a convenient death in the family of Charles from the first film (who was played by the noticeably not-present Jeffrey Jones), three generations of Deetz women are forced to reunite. Indeed, the film is first sparked to life when the grand dame of Boomer Yuppies everywhere, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), returns to a small Connecticut town with her stepdaughter and granddaughter to throw Charles a funeral during the week of Halloween. The first film’s central ghostly characters, the Maitlands (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), are inexplicably no longer there… but old Beetlejuice is.
The Ghost with the Most still haunts the model in the attic, waiting for an excuse to go supersized and finally tie the knot with Lydia… and these days he’s also on a bit of a time-crunch since the ex-wife he dismembered in the afterlife, Dolores (Monica Bellucci), has at last put herself back together and is on the hunt for revenge.
There are in fact several more subplots the synopsis above leaves out, but their absence from needing to understand the main gist of the movie betrays how overstuffed and underwritten Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s screenplay, working from a threadbare story they share a credit with Seth Grahame-Smith on, tends to be. Despite the film running under two hours, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s seemingly simple narrative about three generations of women dealing with differing stages of grief and a relationship to death—ostensibly personified by Beetlejuice—is weighed down by extraneous minutiae and half-formed ideas.
Willem Dafoe’s afterlife movie star-turned-detective, for instance, could be totally excised without the movie missing a beat (or a quality gag). Meanwhile there might have been more time to make Lydia’s unlikely new role as the “grounded” character play a little clearer. If there is one element from the first Beetlejuice painfully missing here, it is the emotional anchor of Adam and Barbara Maitland’s “normalcy,” which counterbalanced the zaniness of just about everyone else in 1988.
Baldwin and Davis understandably cannot return to ghostly roles they did nearly 40 years ago, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s writers never find a strong narrative hook to replace that pair’s to adjust to ghosthood. Fortunately for the writers, the sequel’s qualities do not lie with a script more patched together than Bellucci’s Bride of Frankenstein getup.
The movie might suffer from the narrative unevenness of most modern Burton movies (Grahame-Smith also worked on the lethal Dark Shadows script), but the director’s creativity and ingenuity seems sparked for the first time in nearly 20 years. Almost every scene has a visual fiendishness that is cackle-inducing, and the emphasis on returning to stop-motion effects and unapologetically hokey in-camera visual trickery seems as refreshing for the people making the movie as it is to watch.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a joke bag movie where nearly every frame is about either setup, punchline, or delivery, and more of them land than not. This is most true for Keaton who relishes returning to the decayed makeup, but it could just as easily apply to Ryder in the scenes she shares with Keaton or O’Hara. Gone is the modern maternal fretting Ryder is tasked with doing each season of Stranger Things. The further Lydia gets away from the Beetlejuice 2’s first act, the more the freak flag emerges, reminding the audience of why she was the Gen X alt-girl star of the ‘90s. Maybe it really should have just been a Beetlejuice and Lydia on adventures movie?
Then again, if that had happened we would not have enjoyed the sight of O’Hara stealing nearly as many scenes as Keaton. Delia Deetz turns the loss of her husband into window-dressing for her greatest fixation: herself. O’Hara’s talent for portraying decadently untalented people has obviously never gone away. Just look at Schitt’s Creek. But in as silly and abstract a movie as this, O’Hara is allowed to not worry about things like texture or introspection. Deelia and O’Hara turn self-absorption into otherworldly charm.
The same can be made for a cornucopia of random and endearing touches. At one point, Burton uses Beetlejuice’s reminisces of his marriage with Bellucci as an excuse to homage the black-and-white Italian horror cinema of Mario Bava; in another sequence, a major character’s death scene is jarringly, but cunningly, recounted through the use of claymation. None of these elements necessarily complement one another, but the filmmakers’ maniacal eagerness to throw the kitchen sink at you, as well as the piping, the water tank, and a whole sewer line, browbeats the viewer into laughing along.
The grand finale of the film is where Beetlejuice Beetlejuice inevitably reverts to playing all the hits from the original film in one spectacle, bringing its whole cast (including a largely wasted Ortega) together for a sequence that is only missing Harry Belafonte. But by that point, its eagerness to please and entertain, as if it were a Barnum and Bailey’s circus located inside a Hot Topic, is so wholesome that you cannot begrudge the shameless back-to-back callbacks.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is no all-time classic movie to be cherished by generations-to-come of unborn Goth kids. I’m not even sure it’s a good movie. But it is a good time, and to finally have that again from Burton and Keaton definitely made this writer happy to enter the tent.
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