Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

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Just over 10 years ago, in the wake of the disastrous Alice in Wonderland live-action remake that set off the past decade of nostalgic slop from Disney, I called Tim Burton a hack. In the years since, I’ve softened my stance. This is partially out of the recognition that Burton is a talented stylist, albeit one whose films are only as strong as their scripts. As well, my affection for his early works has grown, namely his Batman movies and his goofy afterlife family comedy, Beetlejuice. Thus, I’m not surprised to find myself thinking that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the legacy sequel to the 1988 classic, is Burton’s best work in a decade—although that’s a pretty low bar. It’s fun to watch Michael Keaton in his gonzo juice mode and to catch up with Winona Ryder’s and Catherine O’Hara’s daughter and stepmother, Lydia and Delia Deetz.

Unfortunately, Burton’s hackish inability to elevate a bad script is still here. Nothing better personifies the film’s lacklustre storytelling than Monica Bellucci’s “soul sucker” Delores, the ex-wife of Betlegeuse’s who escapes from imprisonment in the afterlife, reconstitutes her chopped up body, and heads out on a roaring rampage of revenge against the man who married her (and happened to kill her). Like Bellucci’s villain, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is aesthetically appealing, campy, fun, but frankensteined. It’s a movie with competing plots, almost no narrative momentum, and no ordinary people to bounce all the madness off of, leaving the end result a messy, decently fun, if middling time at the movies.

In the film, we catch up with Keaton’s Betlegeuse in the afterlife and Ryder’s Lydia Deetz in the world of the living. Betelgeuse is apparently back up to his old tricks (par for the course for a resuscitated franchise) working as a bio-exorcist, now operating out of an office manned by his buddies he met in the waiting room at the end of the first film. (Many will recall Bob, the man with the shrunken head.) When his ex-wife, Delores (Bellucci), escapes from captivity, he is pulled into a police investigation by ghost detective Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe) and so he tries to find a way to escape the afterlife once again.

Meanwhile, in our world, Lydia is the star of a popular paranormal reality show, leveraging her ability to see ghosts to become a daytime star with Elvira hair and a preening, goofy producer/boyfriend, Rory (played by an amusing Justin Theroux). When her father, Charles, dies in a shark attack on the way back from a birding trip—having sex offender Jeffrey Jones appear was out of the cards in this family-friendly sequel—Lydia reconnects with her stepmother, O’Hara’s Delia, and her estranged daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Together, they all head back to their mansion in Winter River (the location of the first film) for a funeral and wake, and end up re-encountering Betlegeuse and the denizens of the afterlife due to some bad luck and bad habits.

The set-up of the plot takes around half of the running time, which isn’t such a bad thing when you want to catch up with the characters, but it does make it hard to care too much about the apparent crises that are meant to drive the plot. And as you can tell from the above plot description, there’s a lot going on in the film and it’s not easy to boil down the happenings to a simple logline, like with the first film. In the early going, Bellucci’s Delores is introduced as a nightmarish villain and existential crises for Betelgeuse, but she disappears for much of the runtime, shunted off in favour of hijinx and some convoluted plotting involving Astrid and a cute boy (Arthur Conti) whom she meets in Winter River.

Aside from the plot issues, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is lacking the most important element that made the first film a success: Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis as the recently-deceased couple who are so bewildered by the alternating strangeness and mundaneness of the afterlife. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice attempts to have Ortega’s Astrid serve as the audience surrogate, but it never quite works since Astrid serves the same narrative role as Lydia in the original film: the bemused child who’s too smart for her parents. Thus, the movie is lacking the normies to be bewildered at the absurd situation and who can fuel the exposition that the audience needs to understand what’s going on. As well, Baldwin and Davis had a hilarious, gentle niceness that was an essential counterpoint to the grotesque world of Betelgeuse. In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, there are no foils for the weirdos; everyone is a weirdo now.

Perhaps generating bewilderment isn’t possible in a legacy sequel, when most of the audience will be familiar with the characters and the world and not need the exposition to carry them along. But surely there are many teenage fans of Jenna Ortega who have never seen the first film but will seek this one out because of their affection for Wednesday (Burton directed several episodes of that show and its creators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, are co-writers on this film). Those viewers have a character meant to be their age, but one who lacks the “fish out of water” perspective that can carry them through the story in a proper sense. Thus, while the casting might pitch the movie at Gen Z audiences, the film is really constructed for the older viewers who want to once again cackle at Keaton’s madcap energy, guffaw at O’Hara’s absurd one-liners, and marvel at the production design that showcases new parts of Burton’s Gothic afterlife. Unfortunately, at this point, no one should be surprised when a legacy sequel trades the opportunity to truly craft a new doorway into the storyworld for repetition and nostalgia-mining. 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ends up being simultaneously limp as a narrative yet overstuffed. This likely won’t matter for the viewers who want the nostalgic hit or people who are simply happy to see Keaton reprise his role. There’s some fun to be found in the film’s nostalgia, to be sure. But Tim Burton no longer has the modest command of storytelling that used to hold his stylistic and tonal exercises together. Now, he’s just got the tone and the style and the nostalgia to feed the storytelling, so when he’s handed a bad script, like he is here, he can’t reconcile its disparate parts into a seamless whole. Keaton might still have the juice, but Burton does not.

5 out of 10

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024, USA)

Directed by Tim Burton; written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, based on a story by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith, based on characters created by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson; starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Belluci, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe.

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