Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Of the twenty features Tim Burton has directed, a whopping five or six are worth seeing. One of the good ones is his sophomore outing, Beetlejuice. The imaginative fantasy horror comedy from 1988 fully established Burton's creative and thematic ethos of playfully dark stories about outcasts and loners who are much cooler, more sympathetic, and fun to be around than the normies. The film starred Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis as Adam and Barbara Maitland, a newly deceased couple who reluctantly evoke the titular deranged "bio-exorcist" demon to scare away the wealthy postmodern art lovers from New York who've moved into their home. With this legasequel, Burton, his screenwriters, and a slew of producers and production executives make a valent effort to recapture everything that made the original film so... original without just rehashing the first movie. But while Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn't just a tired exercise in empty fan service, it lacks the fresh, distinctive, clever story that made Beetlejuiceso much fun.

The main thing this new film has going for it is Michael Keaton, who reprises his role as the hilariously manic title character who made the original picture so memorable and rewatchable even though his screen time was limited. Actually, it was because Burton and screenwriters Michael McDowell, Warren Skaaren, and Larry Wilson used the character so sparingly that his frenetic lunacy didn't become tiresome. The new film maintains that same ratio of time spent with Betelgeuse and time spent away from him in this sequel. Unfortunately, the story the filmmakers have concocted isn't anywhere near as inventive, funny, or engaging as that of a naive young New England couple who can't succeed in haunting the pretentious hipsters living in their home without resorting to the help of an out of control, self-aggrandizing ghoul.

The story in this sequel revolves around two more stars who made the original film so special: Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara. Ryder played the sullen goth girl, Lydia Deetz, who befriends the ghosts of the Maitlands and becomes the object of Betelgeuse's ardent desire, while O'Hara was her wickedly narcissistic step-mother Delia, who was more fascinated by the financial and artistic ramifications of living in a haunted house than afraid of them. Thirty-five years later, Lydia has monetized her ability to see dead people by hosting a ghost-hunting TV show. She's been widowed ever since her horror-movie-loving husband disappeared, and she's estranged from her own daughter, Astrid, played by Jenna Ortega. Delia is now a successful conceptual artist, but Lydia's father, played by Jeffrey Jones in the original film, is no longer in the picture. Like most formerly beloved actors whose off-screen lives became problematic, Jones's character has been killed off. Unlike so many of these instances, the milieu of Beetlejuice opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities for a character who is now deceased. But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice handles Jones's externally mandated non-participating as well as the Back to the Future sequels did without Chrispen Glover.

Ortega, who also played the title role in the TV series Wednesday, Burton's updated spin on The Addams Family, does a beautiful job essentially taking on Ryder's disgruntled daughter role from the first film. And the basic narrative through-line the filmmakers have come up with for her is solid. Unfortunately, like all the narrative elements in this movie, it's completely unbalanced. Ortega's Astrid spends the first hour of this movie repeating the same note over and over, and when her storyline and character finally start to get interesting with the introduction of a potential love interest, the film has run out of time to properly develop a narrative line that would have made her character as sympathetic as Ryder's in the first film as well as provided a way for audiences to invest more fully in the story. Meanwhile, Ryder's indelible Lydia is reduced to a one-note basketcase who never truly regains her sense of identity and power. She's a medicated deer in the headlights from start to finish, mostly looking worried, trapped, and confused in various ways. It doesn't help that she's saddled with the albatross of Justin Theroux's one-dimensional drag Rory, Lydia's opportunistic producer and enabling boyfriend.

Extraneous characters are also woven into this movie for no reason I can think of other than to prevent the filmmakers from developing the main plot and the characters we actually might care about. Chief amongst these is Willem Dafoe, who plays a ghost detective named Wolf Jackson, who was a subpar movie star before he died. I have no idea what this character adds to the movie besides another name on the marquee. A bit more integrated into the narrative is Monica Bellucci, Betelgeuse's long-dead ex-wife Delores, who returns with the power to make dead people really dead. The tale of her courtship and murder of Betelgeuse is playfully and hilariously handled, as is, to a lesser extent, the visualization of how Jeffrey Jones was killed. But these are the best of at least a dozen lengthy exposition dumps that weigh this picture down like an anchor. Even past the one-hour mark, we still have characters explaining backstory to each other when we should be well into new narrative threads that complicate and refresh the plot.

Thank goodness Keaton is so funny and clearly invested in making his Betelgeuse performance as good a we remember. True to someone undead, the character doesn't seem to have aged a day. The filmmakers and Keaton put a lot of care and thought into his gags and dialogue, especially in moments that replicate iconic scenes from the first movie. Most significantly, there's the set piece in which Lydia and Rory first call on Betelgeuse and are transported into a miniature model of the town built by the Maitlands. While a reprise of the same scene in the first film in which the Maitlands first meet Betelgeuse, it doesn't feel like a retread. Nor does it attempt to one-up the original scene. It just plays as laugh-out-loud funny. If only the rest of the movie could play so well. But every part of this script that doesn't feature Betelgeuse is sloppy.

The production feels welcomely in line with the aesthetics of the first film. The visual effects look and feel analog and hand-made, even those that obviously aren't. In addition to the effects, the production design, the costumes, and the music all feel like they could have been produced in 1988. The only aspect that breaks continuity with the original film is the critical component of editing. It's not just that Jay Prychidny's cutting is too rapidly paced; there are unforgivable cuts in this film that should be used in film schools as basic examples of what terrible editing looks like and how badly it can undermine a feature.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice establishes a lot of goodwill in viewers (even this one) for the way it avoids many of the issues typical of most contemporary sequels and reboots. But it is not enough for a movie like this to not give in to lame fan service; you gotta give us something of substance. Especially when following up something as idiosyncratic as Beetlejuice, a good legasequel must either do the same thing in a new, more exciting way, like Top Gun: Maverick, or give us something that feels the same on the surface but has a wealth of layers underneath, like Mad Max: Fury Road. Otherwise, why not just rewatch the original?