Beetlejuice Beetlejuice [2024] – ★★1/2

Look, make no mistake – I absolutely adore Tim Burton and Beetlejuice (1988), but this latest sequel by the director who once put “weirdness and goofiness” on the cinematic pedestal assumes that its audience have the attention span of a fly. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a frenetic experience, a frenzied series of darkly comic sketches and various scraps of random stories introduced in such a hectic whirlpool of a motion, we won’t take a breather anywhere in the picture, much less care what is being thrown at us every five minutes (seconds?) or so. The new sequel reanimates, recycles, and recreates vividly the original Beetlejuice environment, characters, and scenes, but hardly provides any original narrative paths. It goes for bleakness, as it abandons the 1988 film’s quiet moments of unhurried ghostly discoveries, full of wonder, funkiness, and love for all things 1980s.

It does not take us long to realise where the main problem lies with this film – in its story. Yes, the original film did not really have a story and that is why its script, written by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren, appealed so much to Burton in the first place. But, this sequel purports to have one – and it has a bad one, too. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice‘s plot is a series of episodes seemingly taken from different horror/comic books and haphazardly stitched together. First, we have adult Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) and her eccentric fiancé Rory (Justin Theroux) who are going or not going to get married, then we have Lydia’s father Charles dying under weird circumstances at sea, and then his funeral.

Then, there is Lydia’s own daughter, teenaged Astrid (Jenna Ortega), a spoiled brat of a sort who is rude to her mother for no other reason than her mother is protective of her, and is different from everyone else, loving and believing in the occult. Astrid makes friends with a random guy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti) while riding (crushing?) her bike. Like Astrid, Jeremy also likes and can quote Dostoyevsky, so I guess that makes them a match made in heaven. How sweet. And, then, there is Delores (Monica Bellucci), a beautiful “femme fatale” murderess and ex-wife of our mad demon Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton). Delores is a “soul-sucker”, yes, who re-assembles her body parts that were chopped off at one point and now seeks revenge on Betelgeuse.

Lydia and her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) keep having these visions of Betelgeuse maybe returning to haunt them, and are visibly anxious – some pretty overblown acting here. But, anyway, then, there is also this ghost detective named Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), from the Afterlife, who still thinks he is that great B-movie actor and his job is to ensure that no one transgresses the Afterlife’s boundaries and rules. Jackson suspects Betelgeuse is up to no good. And, then, the film also recycles the original film’s plot of Lydia possibly marrying someone…finally. Oh. Wait. It turns out she was married before…probably? And now her daughter Astrid wants to know her father Richard (Santiago Cabrera)…better? However, Richard died years previously. Where?…of course, in South America. Richard is now in the Afterlife, and his “dead” appearance is some kind of a… fish-gollum? (No comment). No, these are not some random ideas from the first draft of the script – this is actually the final film shown in cinemas. And, my life dream has changed while watching this film. I don’t want to meet any big celebrity anymore – just the scriptwriters of this mess to have a word or two with them.

And, between all these unconnected story episodes, we have illogical “deals” made by some members of the Deetz family with Betelgeuse. The guy is needed, after all, to get a family member (or two?) back to the Afterlife…or back to the real-life? And, if you are already dizzy reading all this, this film would make you even more so. Oh, and did I mention that Lydia is also now a host of a supernatural talk show Ghost House? A show that begins and ends this film? That inclusion was essential, clearly. And, all of this should also run effectively and in parallel with Betelgeuse’s own practical jokes and the focus on the previous film’s décor and aesthetics. This a collection of random story fragments…about loss, grief? About a mother-daughter relationship? About that hallucinatory baby from Trainspotting dressed as Betelgeuse, but with the attitude of Chucky?

It is true, though, Michael Keaton works magic again as Betelgeuse. With his dead-pan style delivery of lines, and so much hyperactivity and fun menace, it seems he was in the role not 36 years ago, but only yesterday. New characters also simply delight. Bellucci is so good as revenge-seeking Delores, her transformation and “murder” scenes must be among the best, and Dafoe’s turn as that RoboCopish detective-actor can also have its film spinoff and gather audiences.

However, these characters are let down by the script – they are just dumped in the middle of one confusing mess of a narrative, and their connection to this non-story and to each other is almost non-existing. This story is supposed to take place 36 years after Beetlejuice (1988), but even aged characters do not feel like they have grown personally in these 36 years at all. Lydia is still that occult-loving goth, though also now a mother. Delia is still that freakish art-obsessed woman who gets hysterical at the slightest opportunity, and Betelgeuse is still apparently in love with Lydia.

The character of Astrid (Ortega) just puzzles, too. She is so unnecessary, playing a part in a needless ghost sub-plot with a cliché twist that, since we are dealing with teenagers here, is probably some kind of a tribute to R.L. Stine’s books. And, Astrid’s other sub-plot about getting to know her father in the Afterlife is also odd. Why should we care about her emotional attachments if she is presented to us as nothing more than just a bully of her over-protective and slightly controlling, but evidently loving, mother? We see Astrid being teased by other girls, riding a bike, and meeting a boy, and rolling her eyes – a hundred times over. I just want to ask Burton one question – are we appeasing here the newly created fans of Jenna Ortega in Wednesday or thinking about Betelgeuse’s legacy?

As for Lydia’s father – the character Charles, his inclusion in this story by way of his exclusion from this story should be the topic of a separate documentary, no less. Jeffrey Jones’s character Charles is being elevated in this film as this cherished family man who, unfortunately, died, and that film idea alone is so tasteless. I mean, the whole wide world knows already that the reason no one is working with Jeffrey Jones (Amadeus, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) anymore is because he is now a registered sex-offender. The film goes to such lengths to “include” Charles by “excluding” the actor, including resorting to animation and a chopped-in-half-corpse – it is flabbergasting. Just say in one line in the script that Charles has left the family or something, and let’s just not make up multiple references and sublots that try to explain over and over and over again why Charles played by Jeffrey Jones is not seen (in full!) in this picture. Everybody knows why. And, it’s not funny.

We do have many references, objects of curiosity, scenes and settings that were lovingly re-created for this sequel, taking us back to the original Beetlejuice film (especially if the audience has some option to pause the film because its pace would not let the nostalgia to sink in!). There are an imitation of the original film’s opening sequence that recalls the opening of The Shining, details of the House, and we see Delia’s nine-fingered hand sculpture (She made it!), as well as that Dunesque sandworm, among other things. Composer Danny Elfman is again on board, and there are more “passed-away-in-a-funny-way” people to be found in the Afterlife waiting room. So, why all this hasn’t been put to better use? How difficult is it to write a good story for cinema today? Beetlejuice wrote it almost by itself, but this sequel thinks it needs a plot like that in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Does Burton care so little for his original creation? Doesn’t he trust his audience to limit his story to just the main character and his past immediate entourage?

Did Burton want to capture both – the new generation of youngsters glued to their phones (there is an unsubtle reference to their phone addiction in the film) by having such a “bombastic” semblance of a plot and also the older audience, who would be on board anyhow since – isn’t this a Beetlejuice sequel, after all? Burton may have ended up getting them all to buy cinema tickets, but at the expense of actually producing a quality film to be re-watched and cherished for many years to come. This is a Beetlejuice tribute gone haywire, a parody, a laugh at a funeral, a cry at a birthday party.

Beetlejuice (1988) had this unhurried discovery of the ghostly world, for example, through Alec Baldwin’s character picking up book Handbook For The Recently Deceased for the first time – in wonder (not with a sarcastic smirk we see in the new sequel), or Lydia (Ryder) being surprised to see the faces of two strangers glaring at her from a far-off window of her new home. There were pauses and quiet moments in the film to let the audience feel part of this unique, exciting world emerging, the world of Betelgeuse. Quiet realisations of something being amiss had all the time to sink in for the audience…Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does not offer anything of this kind – it goes for a shocking scene, for a well-trodden family drama. Neither does the new sequel wants the fun, bright, funky, goofy look of the 1980s with its neon colours. The new film’s photography is largely bleak, with the black and green colours being the most memorable, and the film’s themes are even traumatising (those Chucky, Cronenbergian body-horror, serial-killer, and police/immigration references!)

Burton’s usual style is all about being macabre, but funny, sinister, but playful. However, his best films are also those that maintained some singularity of tone: either being “Kafka” (bleakness/gloom) (Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow) or a strawberry lollipop (Beetlejuice), and not a mix of the two (like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or in Alice in Wonderland). In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Burton wants to have his cake, and eat it, too. The sequel is again Kafka with a chupa chups. Virtually every other interesting scene, like Delores finding Bob, or Lydia and Astrid re-uniting, are abandoned for another dark shocker or pop culture-induced laugh. This and the super-fast pace mean that this is again Burton being dictated by his audience and their expectations as to what to do, rather than the visionary director making magic within his own creative soul, and producing something unique and precious.

Tim Burton once said: “I’m for anything that subverts what the studio thinks you have to do.” Beetlejuice (1988) worked precisely because it was so refreshingly different from the then traditional tropes of Spielberg, and similar stories and presentations. Now, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does exactly what has been done before by any major studio and numerous times over. Betelgeuse is our new super-hero in some kind of a dark universe-franchise with a barely comprehensible plot to boot. Perhaps, we can now also buy our Betelgeuse or Shrunken Head soft toy the way we can buy fluffy Hedwigs from Harry Potter?

I won’t comment in detail on the editing and pace of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, because it does not have a pace – it has a gallop, a gallop that perhaps appeals to this young generation’s introduction to the world through the super-short form of TikTok videos, where not a single “slow-paced” (sorry, “boring”) minute is allowed to exist. But, all this is bound to leave the original film’s fans, who are not Gen Zs, weary and perplexed.

The art direction does impress. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice strikes a balance in that department to convey the original messy, cardboard-creativity-aesthetics of its famous director. It was all about simple props and practical gags, and now it is also that plus some stop-motion and CGI. Michael Keaton absolutely shines as he reprises the role of one goofy madman Betelgeuse, providing the laughs. Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, Danny DeVito etc. all also deliver one hundred percent in their small roles, making their characters larger than life…and death. But, does it all matter at the end of the day? What we are evaluating and passing judgement on here is not, unfortunately, each of these great characters’ stand-up comedy…or horror (graded A in this instance), but the film itself – Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

As it stands, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice simply disappoints as a story (if you can call something that hectic, random, and bewildering – a story), and as a film overall. The original plotless Beetlejuice film won hearts and minds precisely because it was so cosy, unambitious, unself-conscious, shyly ironic, and unusual. It is often said to “exorcise” the horror genre, and now this confident, super-ambitious, boisterous, self-conscious, wonder-less and in-trend sequel apparently exorcises the original film. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a gory brew of some fifty different beetle-juices mixed together in a super-fast Burtonian blender. The frenzy of the procedure would make one giddy, the colour and aroma of the resulted concoction would both overwhelm with nostalgia and stupefy, but the taste…the taste is simply nauseous.