“Tim Burton's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a fun, stylish sequel that marks a much-needed return to form for the director.”
- Scene-stealing comedic turns by Keaton, O'Hara, Dafoe
- Tim Burton's go-for-broke direction
- A fun, absurd blend of comedy and light horror
- An overstuffed plot
- One underbaked, key emotional throughline
- Several underused characters and actors
Tim Burton has been in a creative rut for well over a decade now. The past 15 years of his career have been populated largely by forgettable dramas and several unfortunate collaborations with Disney, not to mention a truly horrid feature film adaptation of Dark Shadows. Not all of his past few movies have been as awful as that regrettable 2012 disaster. Frankenweenie, Big Eyes, and even — to a lesser degree — Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children have all been fine, if forgettable. But what Burton’s recent output has lacked is the energy of his earlier work — the sense of giddy, gothic fun that made him such a refreshing and distinct artistic voice throughout much of the 1980s and ’90s. Watching many of his 21st-century efforts, one couldn’t help but get the sense that they were witnessing an artist fall asleep at the wheel.
When it was, therefore, announced that Burton was actually moving forward with the long-rumored sequel to his 1988 classic Beetlejuice, there were reasons to be concerned. Was his decision to revisit his one of his most iconic past works an attempt to tap back into the spirit of his earliest films? Or another instance of Burton taking the obvious, but not particularly interesting path? The answer becomes clear early in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, in which Burton proves that he still has the potential to be the unequivocal master of his own oft-imitated aesthetic. In an ironic twist of fate, it’s only in returning to the cinematic world of mischievous demons and agitated spirits that he helped create over 30 years ago that Burton as a filmmaker has begun to show some signs of life again.
Set 36 years after the events of its beloved predecessor, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finds Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) in a place of creative and spiritual decay. As the host of a supernatural investigation show, Lydia has found a way to monetize her unique paranormal powers, but she’s still haunted by visions of unhappy ghosts and her former tormentor, the wily demon Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton). Even worse, she’s wound up trapped in a toxic, codependent relationship with her greedy producer and longtime boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux), who is intent on convincing Lydia to marry him. As he films her going through the motions of taping her lightly spooky TV series, which commercializes Lydia’s personal goth aesthetic, the parallels between her late-career life and the past 15 years’ worth of soulless, regurgitative work that Burton has been relegated to making seem painfully clear.
Lydia is wrenched out of her funk by her narcissistic stepmother, Delia (a scene-stealing Catherine O’Hara), who informs her that Charles, Delia’s husband and Lydia’s father, has suddenly died while on a bird-watching expedition. In one of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice‘s many stylistic tangents, Burton partly visualizes this trip-gone-horribly-wrong in an appropriately absurd Claymation sequence. As Lydia and Delia both struggle to come to terms with Charles’ death, they prepare for his funeral by pulling Lydia’s estranged teenage daughter, Astrid (Wednesday star Jenna Ortega), out of boarding school and traveling back to the Deetzes’ once-haunted home in Winter River. Shortly afterward, Lydia is forced to enter into a new bargain with Keaton’s still-lovestruck Betelgeuse to save Astrid from dying on an ill-advised trip to the afterlife.
To say that’s only scratching the surface of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice‘s knotty plot would be an understatement. The script by Wednesday creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s is full of more characters, ideas, and gags than it knows what to do with. The film is packed to the brim with so many subplots that very few are resolved in any truly satisfying way. As Wolf Jackson, a former B-movie star who works as a police detective in the afterlife, Willem Dafoe gets to deliver many of the sequel’s funniest lines. Monica Bellucci’s Delores, meanwhile, is at the center of one of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice‘s most ingenious and memorable scenes — a gruesome bit of horror comedy in which she literally staples her severed body parts back together. The film never follows through on the promise of Delores’ introduction, though, and both her quest for revenge against Betelgeuse and Wolf’s investigation ultimately reach disappointingly anticlimactic resolutions.
Due to the overstuffed nature of its plot, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice moves at relentless, breakneck pace for much of its 105-minute runtime. Millar and Gough’s screenplay still goes out of its way, however, to try to bridge the gap between Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and its parent film by repeatedly returning to the offscreen source of Astrid and Lydia’s strained relationship. As a result, the film doesn’t actually get to the meatiest and most entertaining portion of its story until well past its midpoint. The bond between Ortega and Ryder’s characters takes the most work to explain and develop, and so it comes the closest of all of the film’s narrative threads to dragging Beetlejuice Beetlejuice down. It doesn’t hurt the movie enough to actually do so, but matters aren’t helped by the fact that Ortega seems stuck here in the same brooding, angsty teenager mode that she’s been inhabiting onscreen for quite some time now.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice‘s increased focus on its franchise’s crooked, psychedelic version of the afterlife helps make up for some of its weaker elements. Mark Scruton’s production design works perfectly in tandem with Haris Zambarloukos’ colorful cinematography to create an updated vision of life after death that seems simultaneously more magical, mundane, absurd, and disorienting than it did in 1988’s Beetlejuice. Behind the camera, Burton also throws all caution to the wind this time around. He packs Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with exciting visual risks and gags, including multiple musical numbers and a first-act black-and-white homage to Italian giallo director Mario Bava that feels like the closest Burton has come in years to recapturing his original, tongue-in-cheek artistic voice. His go-for-broke attitude lifts the new film up and matches the energy of both Keaton and O’Hara, who turn in the sequel’s funniest and best performances.
In 2022, Burton teamed up with Ortega, Millar, and Gough and directed four episodes of Netflix’s Wednesday. His work on the Addams Family spinoff was his strongest and most visually assured in years. He has now followed those episodes up with a sequel that works far better than it should, and which sees Burton operating at his most spirited and inspired since arguably 2003’s Big Fish. While Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finds the space for plenty of homages to its 1988 predecessor, too, the film doesn’t run purely on the noxious fumes of cheap nostalgia. It is a legacy sequel that stands remarkably well on its own because it is less concerned with reminding you of what came before than it is with entertaining you here and now. Along the way, the film also gives back to its director the spark that his work has long been lacking. The juice is, indeed, loose (again).
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is now playing in theaters.
