BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE - Mark Reviews Movies

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Warner Bros. Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 5, 2024

A little bit of Beetlejuice, the playfully malevolent ghost who has made a business out of a kind of reverse exorcism, goes a long way, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice understands that. To be clear, Michael Keaton's weird creation is funny and gross and, in a grossly funny sort of way, as charming as a wicked spirit with boundary issues in both the afterlife and the mortal realm can be. There was more to returning director Tim Burton's original film, though, than that jokey character, who isn't even the most interesting one in that film or this belated sequel.

That's not a bad thing, obviously, when dealing with material that puts Burton's twisted imagination on full display. The gags were many and often morbid in the 1988 film, from the limbo of a post-death waiting room, where everyone looks exactly as they did at the moment of death, to the various attempts by a deceased couple to scare a city family out of what was their pleasant small-town home—including going headless and warping their heads into unnatural shapes.

The sequel takes a lot of those ideas and expands on them in familiar but occasionally unexpected ways. For example, the most memorable joke in the first film might be the dinner table scene, in which the ghosts possess the diners to perform forced choreography to Harry Belafonte's "Day-O," and in this one, let's just say that Burton chooses a much longer and more obscure tune for the sequel's song-and-dance number. The song choice alone is inspired, but it's impressive that Burton somehow sustains the sequence through the majority of the song, while finding a clever way to incorporate its jarring instrumental breaks into the action.

Burton was once one of the more eccentric of mainstream filmmakers, and after a stretch of his output sometimes feeling like incomplete copies of his style, it's a bit refreshing to see him embrace the idea of mimicry here. There's no reason to return to this world of the living and the dead, especially 36 years later, but this follow-up does have its warped pleasures every so often. If the screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar comes across as trying to cram 36 years' worth of stray ideas for these characters into a single movie, that's probably the biggest hang-up about it. It's a significant one, too.

The basics of the plot, which are far from basic once we realize how many players and threads are involved, are mostly an excuse for Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), who could see ghosts—including the dead couple and that trickster—as a teenager and now has a career from hosting a TV show about the paranormal, back to that haunted house. The occasion is the death of her father, with each fake-out demise playing out in stop-motion animation, and the decision of her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) to finally sell the house where she has been miserable for so long.

Along for the funeral and the packing are Lydia's daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who's still mourning the disappearance and presumed death of her father, and the ghost-seer's boyfriend/producer Rory (Justin Theroux), who chooses a most inappropriate time to propose marriage to her. He's not Lydia's only suitor, of course, because Beetlejuice, stuck in the purgatory of pushing papers in an office after his escapades decades ago, still longs for her. When she returns to the old house, Beetlejuice sees his chance to attempt to woo her again.

Seemingly, this is enough of a justification for more otherworldly visions and strange hijinks, but it's just the start of a very busy, very inconsistent narrative. Some of the other pieces include Beetlejuice's first wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), a soul-sucker who has put her chopped-up body back together in the afterlife and wants to finish the job she started on her husband before she died, and Willem Dafoe's Wolf Jackson. He was an actor who did his own stunts—one too many, apparently—playing a tough cop and now is a cop for the spirit realm—even though his assistant has to show him cue cards for his big speech. Both of them are worthwhile but underutilized additions, because the screenplay already has plenty to juggle with its returning and much more relevant new characters.

Ortega's a fine addition, especially since she has the look, attitude, and hints of soulful depth that Ryder brought to the first film, and Theroux plays a guy whose sad puppy dog demeanor is either pathetic or an act. O'Hara has several funny scenes, particularly one that changes her character entirely, while softening Delia's relationship with her stepdaughter, and Ryder adds a touch of the tragic to Lydia's existence of being literally haunted for decades. Keaton hasn't missed a step as Beetlejuice, and the screenplay implements the character without letting him overwhelm what is, again, too overwhelming with everything going on in it.

The movie's most compelling stuff, though, is the comedy and Burton's obvious insistence on using the same kind of special effects from almost four decades ago. Those practical effects worked more than well-enough then, and these ones feel even more unique in a big and modern Hollywood production.

The old ways can work and still be convincing. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice proves that, even if the movie forgets that in terms of its storytelling. Simpler can be better, too—or at least less burdensome.

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