Of all the big name franchises/series/cultural objects that have been granted the (sometimes dubious) honour of a reverent ‘legacy sequel’ in the last few years, none come odder than Beetlejuice. The 1988 original is less a full, functional film than a sizzle reel for the general concepts of ‘Tim Burton’ and ‘Michael Keaton getting weird’, a mishmash of mostly incoherent vignettes strung together by absurdly memorable design work and creepy prosthetics. It’s a film powered mostly by a relentless novelty factor, a novelty that cannot apply to this 36-years-later sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which doubles down on the madcap inanity in a way that is occasionally fun, but also often insufferable.
Burton reconvenes with the Deetz family decades after the end of the original (minus, for obvious reasons, Jeffrey Jones, whose absence is explained in a stop-motion interlude that is one of the high points). Lydia (Winona Ryder) is now a paranormal TV host with a simpering and manipulative new boyfriend (gamely played by Justin Theroux) and a teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who bitterly refuses to believe in the paranormal, while Delia (Catherine O’Hara, giving easily the film’s best performance) is a world-renowned conceptual artist.
Through a series of convolutions back in the original’s setting of Winter River, Lydia finds herself back in the crosshairs of Keaton’s titular ghost-with-the-most, with whom she must make a deal to save Astrid from the afterlife after she is tricked into swapping places with a malevolent ghost. Beetlejuice is dealing with his own problems, being hunted by a vengeful demonic ex-wife (Monica Bellucci), who is herself the target of dead actor/underworld police chief Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe). Just like the original, none of this hangs together very cleanly or seems to really matter all that much, scenes existing mostly to give an excuse to show off some gross-yet-goofy corpses or have Keaton spin a wild monologue.
The result is a story that is both brisk and exhausting, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s script faithfully tapped in to the original’s scattergun silliness. It is sometimes funny, but it’s also impossible to ever really care about (the absence of the Maitlands from the original, while understandable from a behind-the-scenes point of view, is keenly felt given how hard to warm to the rest of the cast are), with little to no tension at any point.
What the original had, though, was a sense of ‘I can’t wait to see what they show me next’, but in 2024, we already kind of know what’s around the next corner. The shrunken-heads guys, the sandworms, and the casually manic authorities of the afterlife all make a return, but this is stuff we’ve seen before, Burton not pushing the limits of this world he created all those years ago. It’s not that any of this is badly executed – the sets, make-up, prosthetics, and splashes of stop-motion animation are all still pretty brilliant, as are the Looney Tunes-style cartoon rules that fuel Beetlejuice – but when it’s a bit more predictable, it struggles to hide how thin everything else is.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the first Tim Burton film to really feel like *Tim Burton* since 2012’s Frankenweenie, and there’s a value to that, as there is to his willingness to make this thing actually gross and gory and disturbing (how it swung a 12a rating is a bit of a mystery), but if you’re not a die-hard fan, there’s a lot of rubbish to sift through. On the surface, this should be endless rambunctious fun, the nonsense internal logic of the afterlife making the wheel endlessly reinventable, but instead there’s mostly a disappointing contentment to rest on its own laurels.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 