If there’s one inarguable thrill about “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”, Tim Burton’s sequel to his 1988 horror-fantasy-comedy “Beetlejuice” is that it is an actual sequence and not a remake masquerading under a different title. The precocious and acerbic teenager of the first film Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) returns now grown-up, with her narcissistic stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and her sometimes nemesis/bio-exorcist Betel-geuse (Michael Keaton) in tow as the primary returnees. After decades away from this world, Burton has reportedly confessed to finding the making of this legacy sequel a significant bit of re-inspiration for him and you can find notes of his excitement in the headiness of fantastical chaos that the old and new characters get up to. So heavy is the excitement that it’s hard to define which of the several intertwining stories Burton, or the film, is meant to be focused on.
Decades after being taken in by the ghost couple in the first film, Lydia Ritz has grown less acerbic. She is a neurotic supernatural talk-show host with a producer/fiancé (Justin Theroux as Rory) whose obsequiousness seems like an ill-match. Gone is the confident wit of her teenage years, instead her daughter Astrid (Jenny Ortega) has taken up resident quip-status – a social pariah at schools for several reasons including her lack of trust in her mother’s purported ghost-seeing skill. The film’s plot is set in motion when Lydia’s father dies and Lydia, her stepmother, her fiancé, and her daughter travel to their house in Connecticut to organize his belongings. While this is occurring, Betelgeuse is still yearning for Lydia (his foiled fiancée from the original film) and being hunted by his own (literally) soul-sucking ex-wife in the form of Monica Bellucci as a 14th century femme-fatale turned ghost and Willem Defoe as a ghost-detective who plays the part of a law-enforcement by way of B-movie star in the afterlife. Suffice to say there’s a lot going on.
Burton’s original “Beetlejuice” is an inarguable giant of 1980s spooky comedic cinema although I have never been as sold on its antics as much as other works of his. A rewatch in preparation for the sequel served as a good reminder that, when considered against the synthetic energy of many contemporary fantasy films, Burton’s work retains an idiosyncratic charm all its own and for the most part traces of that charm are present in the new film, although it’s curious how this sequel both retains and resists some of the elements of its original. A striking concern with the original film was that the sanguine protagonists (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis as a New England couple) often felt less interesting than young Winona Ryder’s sharp-tongued teen or Keaton’s zany – if exhausting – malevolent spirit.
With grown-up Lydia losing much of her edge, Ryder now becomes the “straight-man” to Ortega’s sharp-tongued teen. This is a plot choice meant to serve as a ‘what goes around comes around’ kind of theme but it’s also a move that feels slightly like a disservice to Ryder who seemed stuck in the diffident mother role since her “Stranger Things” success as Joyce Byers. Still, the chemistry with Ortega (believably sullen without becoming one-note or shrill) is one of the highlights of this new film that finds Burton tenderly stoking familial dynamics in interesting ways. If only he could commit to paying attention to that rather than an enervating subplot concerning Theroux’s undeserving fiancé that the film’s writers (Alfred Gough and Miles Millar) seem to think is much more interesting than it is.
Better deployed is Astrid’s romance with a mysterious isolated boy in the town (Arthur Conti as Jeremy Frazier) that sends the film into its third act in fine style. The arc leads to a wonderful confluence of disasters when the three Deetz women all find themselves in the world of the dead, struggling to return to the land of the living. The maternal dynamic between the two is the film’s strongest arc and even as the film is visibly struggling at moments to tie O’Hara’s previously exhausting stepmother with a figure more amusingly engaging, the chemistry of the three women offer “Beetlejuice Beetle-juice” some wonderfully light moments, even if it’s straining too much at being funny without ever feeling truly committed to the easy hilarity it wants to create. If I’ve failed to mention much of the title character, it’s because despite screen time that very likely increases from the original, Keaton’s ghost spends much of the film trapped in a different subplot that reveals a film that is juggling too many things to keep its focus.
It’s strange how a film that’s only 104 minutes feels both overstuffed and intermittently undercooked. There’s a lot at work here, multiple plots jockeying for supremacy and swirling together into something cacophonous and at times exhausting. It’s energetic from moment to moment, featuring three musical sequences that knowingly try to tease the musical charm of its original, but there are moments it all seems like too much too fast. It’s hard to feel too annoyed with it all because it’s clear that Burton is, at least, having fun with this. Still, as someone who’s never believed that Burton has truly lost his directing skill (not with films like “Big Fish”, “Frankenweenie”, “Corpse Bride” or “Sweeney Todd” over the years) the reports that this is a 21st century return to form for him feel somewhat over embellished. It’s a satisfactory sequel in more ways than one, oftentimes meaner and grizzlier than its predecessor. But what’s fun in this new “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” often feels more like freneticism than fun. To its credit, it ends just before it completely wears out its welcome.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is playing in cinemas