Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Review – The Juice is Loose

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice offers a refreshingly unhinged viewing experience. It has a lot of elements that sound like brutal criticisms, but they all work bizarrely well in context. It feels like Tim Burton had a Beetlejuice series, but he cut it into a tight 105-minute experience. This leaves the film feeling completely detached. Critical events pass without much impact, conflict rises and falls without mention, and the whole piece passes like a Looney Tunes episode. Still, it all works within its goofy, undead context.

Tim Burton returns to his fascinating macabre playground after 36 years. He’s a different man now, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice proves that the old spark is still there. Burton wasted his time and energy on abysmal live-action Disney remakes for too long. The Alice in Wonderland movies feel like someone drowned the cartoon in dishwater. His Dumbo killed any interest in any future Disney collaborations (leading to an unsubtle nod in this film.) At least he can remix his own work for a new era.

A Ghost of a Plot

The original Beetlejuice wasn’t exactly Die Hard in terms of narrative focus, but it was fairly straightforward. The sequel is a mess of half-formed ideas that rise and fall with reckless abandon. The film’s center is a chain of dodgy motherhood and rambunctious teenage angst. Former goth teen Lydia Deetz is all grown up and out on her own as the star of a Zak Baggins-style ghost show. This embarrassing spectacle comes at the behest of Lydia’s boyfriend, a therapy-speak-wielding abuser and the most despicable character in a movie about ghosts, monsters, and demons. When Charles Deetz turns up dead through spectacular means, Lydia rejoins her stepmother Delia and her distant daughter Astrid for the funeral. From there, the film stitches together its random ideas until it arrives at a semi-reasonable conclusion.

The draw here should be the characters, but they don’t easily cut through the noise. They are, however, relatively unique, interesting, and nuanced. The original Beetlejuice presented an in-depth picture of its rich weirdos, distant goth daughter, and rapidly unraveling ghost couple. Winona Ryder returns to the role of Lydia Deetz, who has outgrown her rebellious nature. She escaped one bad relationship, but her new boyfriend demonstrates that humans can be just as unpleasant. Jenna Ortega’s Astrid shares main character duties, but she replaces much of Lydia’s artistic self-pity with a modern dash of activism. Perhaps Burton and his team wanted to push her away from unnecessary Wednesday comparisons. Her relationship with Lydia is tenuous, partially because Astrid doesn’t believe in ghosts, seeing her mom as a half-mad sell-out. Catherine O’Hara is hysterical as an even more unhinged Delia Deetz. And then there’s Beetlejuice.

It’s Showtime

There is one reason and one reason alone to make this movie. Tim Burton wanted to give Michael Keaton more time to play Betelgeuse. The plot is a decorative garden for the ghost to bounce around in. He enjoys roughly twice as much screentime as he did in the original film. Betelgeuse served multiple purposes in that 1988 classic, but he’s all over the place here. He teleports wildly around the scene, causing and solving problems with few stops to breathe. One of the tangled strands of tattered narrative thread involves a would-be antagonist in the form of Betelgeuse’s ex-wife. Remember that gag where Keaton pulls a wedding ring from a severed finger before assuring Lydia that she meant nothing to him? What about that one in which he swears he lived through the plague? Monica Bellucci’s Delores solidifies those jokes into around 5% of a character.

So, Juice has motivation, a new gig, and a personal antagonist to grant him conflict. Keaton is totally game for the old routine, bringing the same energy to the piece after all these years. He may as well be Bugs Bunny, resolutely resisting the growth that every other character has endured. That ensures, for better or worse, that Betelgeuse is simply still the same guy. Between Keaton, Ryder, and O’Hara, the returning cast is going to make a lot of people really happy. There’s a refreshing lack of reverence for the previous material, but the film gets its references where it needs them. That’s not to say he’s bereft of new tricks. There is a bizarre repeating gag that involves a theoretical Betelgeuse Jr., and the implications are rather galling given recent political events. Keaton is worth the price of admission alone for anyone who enjoyed the original.

Don’t Say It Again

I really like a lot of parts of this movie, but the details just refuse to come together. Willem Dafoe plays a ghost detective who used to be a pretentious actor. Burn Gorman has a hilarious bit part as a local reverend. One of the first scenes unpacks the graphic death of a key character in a bizarre animated sequence. Delores gets a Universal Monsters-esque birth set piece that sets entirely the wrong tone. The thematic cleverness of almost every main character facing a similar unwanted contract arrangement feels oddly well-constructed. This patchwork experience delivers a ton of stellar beats, but it doesn’t amount to much. I wouldn’t recommend multiple viewings, but the film works as a roller coaster. A lot of the jokes land, the effects are often jaw-dropping, and the imagery never slows down.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will keep you on the edge of your seat, but you should probably try not to think too much about it. It has enough energy to carry you through the shockingly tight runtime, but absolutely nothing has an impact. No conflict, resolution, emotional beat, or punchline rouses more than a momentary audience pop. I like to imagine Tim Burton running down a checklist of ideas he came up with over the last 36 years. I hope everyone had a good time with this one, because it sure feels like they did. Maybe next time it can feel a little more like a movie and a little less like the result of Betelgeuse’s directorial debut.