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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Review
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
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Directed By: Tim Burton
Written By: Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith
Runtime: 104 minutes
MPA Rating: Rated PG-13 violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material, and brief drug use
Michael Keaton – Beetlejuice
Winona Ryder – Lydia Deetz
Catherine O’Hara – Delia Deetz
Jenna Ortega – Astrid Deetz
Justin Theroux – Rory
Willem Dafoe – Wolf Jackson
Monica Bellucci – Delores
Arthur Conti – Jeremy
Burn Gorman – Father Damien
Santiago Cabrera – Richard
Nick Kellington – Bob
Danny DeVito – Janitor
For years, Tim Burton flirted with the idea of a Beetlejuice sequel, and now it’s finally here. Unfortunately, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice fails to recapture the macabre, mischievous magic of the original. Burton’s direction looks less like the Burton of old in this haphazard, meandering slog. Instead, the film more stylishly resembles a Beatles cover band whose music sounds more like The Monkees.
Decades after the Maitlands (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in the original) attempted to haunt the Deetz family out of quaint Winter River, Connecticut home, Lydia Deetz (Ryder) effectively sold out. Using her gift of communing with the dead, Lydia becomes a D-list celebrity, hosting a schlocky paranormal reality series, Ghost House. Her producer/boyfriend, Rory (Theroux), is an emotional parasite and resembles someone who would greatly annoy Lydia in her youth. Lydia’s activist daughter, Astrid (Ortega), can barely stand her mother’s presence. Unfortunately, the death of Lydia’s father, Charles (Jeffrey Jones in the original), reunites Lydia and stepmother Delia (O’Hara) in Winter River, the town from the original film, where they still own the Maitland home.
Meanwhile, in the Neitherworld, Beetlejuice left the freelance bio-exorcist game, promoted to middle-management bureaucracy in the Afterlife hellhole. A buffoonish janitor mistakenly unleashes Beetlejuice’s ex-wife, Delores (Bellucci), the leader of a soul-sucking death cult. She can suck out the souls of the dead, creating a permanent death. Despite the significant setup for Delores as the central villain, the plot thrusts her into the background shortly after her introduction. Beetlejuice still harbors a spark for Lydia in his quest to marry her and continues haunting her in the real world. The sequel presents an unfocused overabundance of subplots and ideas, resulting in a sloppy, slapdash cinematic experience. The plot runs like an overstuffed outline, reformatted into a first draft with zero rewrites or notes. The narrative lacks a strong central plot.
With a runtime of under two hours in length, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice runs slovenly in its first half. The plot has no sense of momentum. It overstuffs a tangled group of underdeveloped characters and ideas, lacks focus and does not have a cohesive narrative. Bellucci looks visually striking as Delores. Delores and Beetlejuice’s backstory is interesting, but the film fails to develop Delores’ character any further. Her entire goal stems from revenge on her ex-husband, but Beetlejuice isn’t the protagonist. He’s barely even an antihero, yet Burton and writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar refuse to commit to making Beetlejuice a villain. It’s understandable because Beetlejuice came out of the original as an iconic, fan-favorite character, but he’s a slightly more docile version of Freddy Krueger.
With more scenes in the Land of the Dead, the sequel offers a greater exploration of its rules and hierarchy. Tim Burton finds his best visual foothold in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with the Neitherworld scenes since the undead realm plays to his natural style and sensibilities. However, for its cartoonishly morbid style and presentation, the numerous Neitherworld characters serve no genuine purpose. Most of what happens in the Neitherworld is rather pointless. A good example is Willem Dafoe’s character, Wolf Jackson, an ex-action movie star who acts as an undead detective, policing the spirits of the Neitherworld. Dafoe proves his comedic chops as Wolf Jackson. He enjoys portraying a live-action cartoon character, yet the character doesn’t serve much of a narrative purpose.
Similarly, the writers force an ongoing subplot involving the grim fate of Charles Deetz, but Burton constantly works around the character’s original actor being unusable for the picture. The film depicts Charles’ untimely fate using an oddly out-of-place stop-motion animation sequence. Obviously, Burton has a long, illustrious history with stop-motion animation, but using it here sticks out a great deal when there is no other scene with this type of animation in the rest of the film. It plays like an introduction to using stop-motion animation for multiple flashback scenes. If the idea was for Burton to pay homage to his history with stop-motion animation, the execution falls flat, just like the rest of the film. The plot constantly revisits Charles Deetz in the Neitherworld, when it seems like writing out the character in an offhanded manner, similar to Maitlands, would have been a preferable choice.
The sequel is not without its charms. Catherine O’Hara delivers a fun, charismatic performance as Delia. It’s nice to see Winona Ryder return to the role of Lydia, even with such a disappointing story. A plot that explores three generations of Deetz women might have been interesting. It’s gratifying that Lydia and Delia eventually grew to like one another. A story exploring Lydia trying to get back in touch with her goth girl roots while bonding with her daughter, Astrid, who is her mother’s daughter, also could have worked. The narrative nearly comes together in the thread where Astrid becomes trapped in the Neitherworld, forcing Lydia to request Beetlejuice’s aid to rescue her daughter. Unfortunately, it happens way too late and ends too quickly. A movie focusing on Lydia and Beetlejuice braving the Neitherworld and Delores while seeking to rescue Astrid would have produced a much more exciting adventure, but Burton never cracks the code.
Michael Keaton is undeniably entertaining as Beetlejuice. He hasn’t lost his touch with the role 36 years later. The problem is that Burton and the writers can’t pick a lane with his character. The nature of the plot and his goal to marry Lydia makes him a villain, but Burton and the writers spend so much time with the character that Beetlejuice dominates the plot. Burton stages Delores’ introduction as the plot’s inciting incident, but it never amounts to much. Making Beetlejuice more of a protagonist because he’s so zany, funny, and wildly unpredictable is an idea with potential. It works fine in the animated series, but less is more with Beetlejuice in the movies.
The most likable character in the film is Bob, Beetlejuice’s long-suffering Shrinker assistant. Something cruel happens to Bob, and its depiction is mean-spirited in a way the original was not. It’s especially sad because Bob proves to be a loyal, pitiful character who is just trying his best.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice plays like a woefully underwhelming legacy sequel. All the elements and main characters are there, but the execution falls flat. The script runs like a rough early draft that needed significantly more time in the oven. Once daylight came after watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I definitely wanted to go home.
