Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice is the definition of a cult classic, a film that did okay enough in its own time only to go on to spawn a rabid, multi-generational fanbase. It’s Burton’s sophomore film, sandwiched between Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Batman, and is arguably the quintessential Burton film, with all of his directorial signatures, from utilizing stop motion animation to miniatures to eye-popping practical effects, all tied together with a spooky aesthetic for the indoor kids, from the Escher-like view of the afterlife to a real world that comes in basic Crayola colors and rigid shapes. In this way, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the 1988 film’s long-gestating sequel, feels like a return to form for Burton, after a decade-plus of overreliance on computer effects and drab gray palettes.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has all the old Burton regalia—charming if macabre stop motion sequences, eye-popping practical effects, beautiful miniatures, and that spooky aesthetic that swings from colorful to achromatic but is always wonderful to look at. The film brings back Winona Ryder as iconic Goth girl Lydia Deetz, now a single mom whose daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), loathes her as Lydia once loathed her stepmother. Catherine O’Hara returns as Delia Deetz, the aforementioned stepmother, though the film, which is written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, with a story by Gough, Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith, disposes of Charles Deetz in appropriately gnarly if comical fashion (because actor Jeffrey Jones is a convicted sex offender).
This core of Deetz women coming together in the wake of Charles’s death is the best part of the film. O’Hara and Ryder, particularly, get a great scene acknowledging their complicated past and showing how their relationship evolved over 36 years. Both their performances do feel infected by more recent work, though. The Delia Deetz of today feels more akin to Moira Rose, the affably batty mother on Schitt’s Creek, than the domineering, snappish Delia of the 80s. Similarly, middle-aged Lydia is harried and spacey a la Joyce Byers. Certainly, characters can change, but here it feels less like a deliberate decision to revamp these characters, and more like the actors floundering a little with underwritten parts. Jenna Ortega is also stranded because Astrid is, too, underwritten. She doesn’t feel like a remix of Wednesday Addams, but there are a couple moments when Ortega seems lost within the scene.
The key problem with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that it’s both doing too much, and not doing enough. There is a lot of plot in the film, lots of different threads and things happening, but no character feels particularly fleshed out. Several, including an undead bride played by Monica Bellucci and a dead actor played by Willem Dafoe, are completely superfluous. They’re both having fun, and it isn’t unpleasant to watch them do their undead thing, but their characters contribute to the too muchness of the film, and despite all their gleeful mugging, they don’t really add anything.
Beetlejuice was a simple story: a family moves into a haunted house, the ghosts try to get them to move out. The one bit of “flair” is Betelgeuse himself, a spanner in the works between ghosts and humans. But Michael Keaton is only in Beetlejuice for a relatively scant seventeen minutes, the movie is named after his character, but he’s basically the Macguffin. Here, his role is expanded, obviously because Betelgeuse is one of Keaton’s most beloved characters, and Burton & Co. presume audiences want more of him. But the film doesn’t actually need that much Betelgeuse. Everything revolving around him takes away from the core of the Deetz women, somewhere in here is a simpler story about grief and moving on, in which Betelgeuse would again be the complicating if comedic factor alleviating the darker themes. (It always comes back to want vs. need.)
It's not like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is bad. It isn’t bad. It’s just not as good as it could have been, giving a talented cast too little to do—Justin Theroux makes the most hay playing a cretinous hanger-on who uses therapyspeak to insinuate himself into Lydia’s life—and introducing way too many plot lines to do any of them justice. Besides the grieving Deetzes and Lydia and Astrid’s conflict—which relates to their shared grief, someone, at some point, understood the heart of this story—there is Betelgeuse hiding from his undead wife, a dead actor-playing-cop chasing Betelgeuse, Astrid’s first boyfriend and a trip to hell, a cohort of Betelgeuse’s undead underlings escaping the afterlife, Lydia’s wedding, and Burn Gorman playing a creepy priest, a bit that goes nowhere and doesn’t pay off. I can only assume something ended up on the cutting room floor.
It's too much. The film runs a relatively fleet 105 minutes, but every minute is packed to the gills with STUFF. The story needs pruning, to let characters and the narrative breathe. Instead, we’re constantly running to the next set piece. And yes, they all look incredible, and many are genuinely funny. There are plenty of references to the original film, but also lots of good new jokes, too. Again, this isn’t a bad film, it’s just a busy one. But that busyness comes at the expense of great actors revisiting beloved characters, and not really getting to do much with them. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice brings back the look of classic Burton, but the feeling is still missing. It’s less engrossing the second time around, and like most of Burton’s later work, it feels like old school Burton sanded down for new school audiences.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is now playing exclusively in theaters.:
