Movie Review: ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael Keaton. Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti

Plot: Lydia, along with her daughter Astrid and boyfriend Rory, return to Winter River following the death of her father. After reuniting with her step-mother Delia, a situation that forces them to deal with manic poltergeist Beetlejuice once more.

Review: If this doesn’t become the death knell of the whole ‘requel’ trend, it’s hard to imagine what will do it. The idea of bringing back the original cast while handing the reigns to a new generation of actors. It reached peak fun with Scream, that at least played on the idea, but after Ghostbuster Frozen Empire failed to capitalise on what they set up previously we thought this fad would be over. The Top Gun Maverick lightning isn’t going to strike twice. It certainly didn’t strike this long, long, long awaited follow-up to the kooky cult comedy from the 80s that happened to strike big off the back of Keaton’s madcap improv performance.

We pick up with the Deetz family almost 40 years after the events of the original film. Beetlejuice (Keaton) is trapped working as a middle-manager in the Afterlife and for some reason still pines over the teenager he tried to force into marriage because it would allow him to return to the living world. Lydia (Ryder) is a celebrity TV host who specialises in visiting people’s haunted houses and raising her distant teen daughter Astrid (Ortega). Right there we’ve got two interesting ideas that never come up again. Lydia’s ghost hunting doesn’t get explored – I was waiting for the reveal that she had a team of ghosts helping her out or something. The fact that she’s a celebrity medium gets brushed under the rug so we can pretend 40 years haven’t passed and this is basically the same person. What Beetlejuice has been up to is likewise ignored…it appears he stopped trying to get out of the Afterlife by scamming people and now has an unrequited true love with Lydia.

Lydia is contacted by Delia (O’Hara) who informs her that her father has died and that they’re all heading back to the original house in Winter River for the funeral. Don’t worry about the Matlands though, they’re gone because of a ‘loophole’. They’re only the main characters of the original film, we can brush them aside. Instead, more screen time needs to be dedicated to reminding us that Jeffrey Jones still exists (put a pin in that, we have much more to say on that point) and Lydia’s relationship drama with her boyfriend Rory (Theroux).

Oh, and Beetlejuice’s ex-wife is after him and he’s wanted by the police. You don’t need to put much more thought into those plots though. The scriptwriters sure didn’t.

The real meat of the story doesn’t kick in until a massive 1 hour 15 minutes into the movie, when Astrid discovers that her new boyfriend (Conti) is a ghost and he lures her into the Afterlife with the promise of seeing her father, but it’s an evil plot to ‘steal her life’. This forces Lydia and Delia to summon Beetlejuice as a means to get Astrid back alive. We know that it took Beetlejuice himself a surprising long time to turn up in the original, but we had the whole story of the Matlands learning about the afterlife and battling against the Deetz to keep things moving. For some mind-boggling reason, Burton seems to think Louis Theroux mugging to the camera is enough to fill an hour.

Rory is Lydia’s boyfriend and the producer of her TV chat show. He’s presented as a ridiculous character trying to connect with Astrid and being some kind of parody of a modern man (he invites influencers to the wedding…get it?). It feels like we spend more time with this schtick than great comedic performers like O’Hara and it gets frustrating when we have Beetlejuice running riot through the bright and wacky Afterlife only to cut back to this nothing character overreacting to something. I’d rather we cut back to Burn Gorman as the oddball priest – that’s a character I wanted to see more comedy relief from.

Meanwhile, in the background of this story about a man getting emotional over a wedding, we have something that looks like it could have been interesting. Monica Bellucci plays Beetlejuice’s wife from when he was alive, and she’s such a danger that her dismembered body has been kept in seperate boxes for centuries. When the boxes get knocked over, she staples herself together and goes after Beetlejuice. There’s a great, very long sequence of her reassembling herself, and even a Danny DeVito cameo, to set her up as the big antagonist for the story…and then she gets maybe 2 more minutes of screentime across the rest of the movie. Likewise, Dafoe is an action movie star turned Afterlife cop who is trying to catch her and deal with Beetlejuice. When he comes bursting in during the big finale, Beetlejuice says one word and he’s done with. It genuinely feels like all the notes from a story brainstorming session got given the green light and they didn’t stop to turn it into a script.

By the end, everyone has come together for the big finale, they redo the joke where people mime singing a song but less funny this time, and then they resolve every hanging plot thread with the minimal about of effort, stakes or interest possible. One moment involves Beetlejuice pulling out an unbreakable contract deal Lydia signed, but then Astrid mentions that she read in a book that it doesn’t count. That’s the full resolution – something she read somewhere, I guess.

So the story is a confusing and unsatisfying mess, but this is a comedy and it can get by on the jokes. As long as you like the jokes from the first movie and are just tickled to see them again but not as good this time. Leaning on nostalgia is a big feature of this outing, bringing back props, costumes and sets galore. They don’t actually do anything with them, they just wave them in front of you and expect cheers (granted, one cinemagoer at our session was REALLY happy to recognise these things). The most egregious example is the Shrunken Head man from the first movie. A short sight gag in the original is now a major draw card and potential merchandising goldmine!

Now there’s a bunch of these guys in matching yellow suits and names like ‘Bob’ and ‘Frank’. They run around, flapping their arms and making funny noises. Then they get into the living world where they…run around flapping their arms and making funny noises. Yes…they seem to have found a way to add Minions to this franchise. Burton seems to find this gag so funny that the Shrunken Head guys get special mentions at the opening of the end credits where ‘Bob’ gets a longer credit than Michael Keaton.

This is all nit-picking gripes, and if the nostalgia is enough to carry you through then you will get a kick out of it, but we haven’t gotten to the biggest, most confusing inclusion in the movie.

We knew Jeffrey Jones wasn’t returning as Charles Deetz going in. We saw a funeral in the teaser trailer, so we figured he’d been killed off-screen, and we assumed this was because Jones is a child sex offender. And then, for some truly head-scratching reason, Burton feels compelled to constantly draw attention to his absence. When his death is revealed at the beginning of the movie we get a drawn out, very out-of-place animated sequence of how he died. Then his funeral includes a big photo of him on the grave marker, which we return to over and over again. On top of it all, we keep returning to him in the Afterlife where he’s wandering around with his head bitten off and a clearly different voice. We don’t want to see this guy in movies, we’re fine with him being written out, but we cannot understand why they keep drawing attention to his absence while Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis’ characters get a throw-away line of dialogue.

It’s downright perplexing. Maybe Burton was told to get rid of the character, but wanted to keep him involved out of loyalty or friendship or something. If that’s the case, all this will do is draw attention to why he’s not in it and I doubt he wants people looking into it.

There’s some good ideas and performances throughout this film, but the lack of time spent ironing out the script and having a real idea worth bringing everyone back for. Focusing on the ghost boyfriend plot, starting it much earlier in the run time, could have saved this but when we’re juggling Rory being emotional, the ex-wife, the wacky cop, Rory, the shrunken head gang and Rory scenes we end up with a lot of nothing.

Review: THREE out of TEN