Nineteen eighty-eight’s Beetlejuice was a surprise comedy hit, cementing Tim Burton’s reputation as a director who could bring an off-kilter, slight dark worldview to the screen, as well as inspire half the inventory of future Hot Topic stores across the malls of America. Over the years, there have been a number of attempts to bring a sequel to the big screen. Fans wanted to see more of Keaton’s “the ghost with the most,” and studios wanted to see more of the box office revenue that they felt a sequel could bring. But like dealing with the chaos demon himself, be careful what you ask for.
Following the tragic death of her father, Lydia (Winona Ryder), her mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) all return to the small town of Winter Creek, where Lydia had her encounter with the chaotic spirit Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) so many years ago. Lydia is now a famous ghost expert with her own TV show, while Astrid is a firm non-believer, angry at her mother in part of her parents’ divorce, her father’s subsequent accidental death and for being ignored by Lydia in favor of her pursuing her career. During the wake, Lydia gets pressured into agreeing to marry her television show producer/boyfriend (Justin Theroux, just oozing smarm in every frame he’s in) on Halloween, which happens to be in two days. Astrid meanwhile heads into town where she meets up with a boy who might just be a kindred spirit. Meanwhile in the afterlife, someone from Beetlejuice’s past has pulled themselves together enough to seek him out for vengeance.
The original Beetlejuice was a well-measured comedy where its titular character stood out for his frantic nature and the chaos he brought with him. The sequel makes the mistake of trying to match Beetlejuice the character’s freneticism in its own storytelling. The result is something overstuffed and wildly chaotic, and not often in a fun way. The inciting incident of the death of dad Charles feels overdone and generates at least one plot thread that could have easily been snipped. Likewise, Monica Bellucci’s character Delores, the vengeful figure from Beetlejuice’s past, is similarly disposable. The character is a callback to two throwaway jokes from the original film, is an attempt to raise some tension in parts of the film where it is not needed and ultimately leaves one wondering if we really need an origin story for Beetlejuice.
Where the original film was in its way a comic examination of grief and death, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. The most interesting aspect about the film could be the broken relationships between mother and daughter combinations Delia and Lydia and Lydia and Astrid. And there is even a bit of exploration of that here, though the idea mostly gets lost among all the other flailing plotlines. The idea that Astrid is a firm non-believer in ghosts has potential but the way it is resolved before the third act begins is just short shrift. The original film offered some fun peeks behind the curtain at an afterlife sculpted from German expressionism and Looney Tunes cartoon physics. But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice spends a much larger bulk of its running theme there, and the attempts to flesh it out more offer nothing but a diminishing return
Now there are a few items in the plus column for the film. O’Hara makes a delightful return to her ridiculous artist character from the original film, tempered with just a bit of motherly wisdom she may have gained, probably accidentally, through the years. Keaton certainly looks as if he is having as much fun as he has had in a long time running amuck as Beetlejuice. If anything, the seldom glimpsed darker, more menacing, side of the character peeks out with an sharper edge this time around. Willem DaFoe also looks to be having fun as Wolf Jackson, a deceased cop-movie-actor-turned-actual-detective-in-the-underworld who is trying to track down Delores. Georgina Beedle as his secretary who enters every scene the character is in to pretty much just hand Wolf a cup of coffee is perhaps the best running gag of the film.
