In a movie-making era overrun by studio-generated legacy sequels, remakes, and requels, it’s hard not to be cynical about the mere existence of many of these movies. While a sequel to Beetlejuice had been discussed as far back as the 90s, it obviously has only come to fruition now. With abated sequels like Ghostbusters: Afterlife treating the original material with a preciousness that the first film never had, it and its kin like Rogue One sacrifice story, characters, and originality on the altar of nostalgia bait and predictability. Most of these films do not feel like the unique vision of a filmmaker but the product of corporate committee milking its IP.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is far from a perfect film but one of its best attributes is that it at least avoids falling into that nostalgia bait trap and feels like an actual sequel to the off-kilter dark comedy of the first film. Mostly anyway, as this movie does have its share of “Do you remember this?” moments. Beetlejuice does his scary face thing with tentacles, there’s a dance sequence where people are taken over and someone sings through them, the sand worms appear, the shrunken head men return and in larger numbers.
But Tim Burton at least seems to want to do something somewhat different with the material. A lesser version of this film would have simply replayed the plot beats of the first film with Jenna Ortega fulfilling the role Winona Ryder‘s Lydia did in the first film as roles are reversed. While there is some of that, the plot is quite different in fact and there’s some different character dynamics, despite the return of Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, and of course, Michael Keaton as the titular character.
There’s actually almost too much other plot, as the film becomes a jumbled mess in the middle as three different plot threads compete with each other and most of the plot-lines resolve in a fairly perfunctory manner. As entertaining as Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe are in a plot-line involving Beetlejuice’s wife returning to chase him down, with Dafoe playing an actor who played a cop on TV in life now committing to the role in the afterlife, this ends up feeling entirely perfunctory. Jenna Ortega manages to get tricked into giving up her life for the ghost of a teenage killer to return to life, and there’s also a plot-thread of Lydia’s boyfriend, played by a wonderfully quirky Justin Theroux, pressuring her to marry him. Beetlejuice is running throughout all of these various plot threads, but none of it threads together with any grace. Some plot beats are quite literally forgotten in the climax of the film.
But for as overstuffed as the film is, Burton didn’t forget to come up with new unique darkly comedic sequences. As mentioned, newcomers like Theroux and Dafoe fit the vibe of the Beetlejuice world and are highly entertaining. The film flexes its creative wings with a stop-motion animation to explain the partial absence of Jeffrey Jones and a black-and-white sequence paying homage to Mario Bava films to serve as the origin of Beetlejuice. These comedic moments help elevate the film and provide some of the biggest laughs.
Burton earned a reputation early in his career for a unique visual style, exemplified in films like the first Beetlejuice and this film at least maintains much of that. There are some fun visual gags and the overall fantastical macabre vibe works its way throughout the film. This feels like one of Burton’s freshest films in years.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has many flaws, being somewhat of a narrative mess and lacking in the same degree of subtle insight that the first film offered. But in a landscape where sequels like this tend to be creatively bankrupt slop, this one is refreshing by comparison. One can watch this and feel like it actually came into being due to some unique ideas, even if not always well-executed, rather than made by marketing executives to check market share boxes.
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