Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review: Tim Burton’s return is a not-bad sequel sequel

The one spectre Lydia doesn’t want to see is Betelgeuse. Photo / Warner Bros

REVIEW

Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Tim Burton return in an overstuffed ghost story.

When Beetlejuice was released 36 years ago – you read that right; in the Before Times – director Tim Burton was not yet a household name. Winona Ryder, making her third movie, was all of 16 years old. Michael Keaton was in an early career slump. And no one had any idea what that movie title was about.

Nearly four decades is enough to turn anything into an institution, though, and since Burton’s scruffy little ghost comedy has already been repurposed as an animated TV series, a video game and a 2019 Broadway musical, it’s a wonder a simple sequel took this long. Here Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is at last, and a mixed bag it is, too, with highs that are almost up there with the maniacal, macabre invention of the original and lows that are big-studio business as usual.

It matters that the three returning actors from the first movie are the right three – Keaton, Ryder and Catherine O’Hara as the lavishly pretentious Delia Deetz – that Burton is still in the director’s chair, and that Danny Elfman’s musical score, a character in its own right, returns like a runaway calliope. Taken as a whole, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is entertaining enough for a night out at the megaplex or a lazy Saturday streaming at home, but in plot and impact, it points up how the movies have changed since 1988, and not for the better.

The main difference between Beetlejuice and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that the new movie has a plot – about five of them, in fact. Lydia Deetz (Ryder), the Goth teen from the first film, is all grown up and monetising her ability to see dead people in a hit TV show where she investigates other people’s haunted mansions. The one spectre she doesn’t want to see is Betelgeuse (Keaton), the grotty demon in the black-and-white zoot suit, but lately, he’s been popping up in Lydia’s field of vision, sending her into panic attacks and worrying her boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux), who everyone but Lydia can see is an exploitative sleaze.

Jenna Ortega plays Astrid, daughter of Winona Ryder's Lydia Deetz, in Tim Burton's new film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Photo / Parisa Taghizadeh, Warner Bros

In a storyline that has now been officially beaten to death by Hollywood, Lydia has a teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who hates her mom and, more heretically, doesn’t believe in ghosts. (Will mother and child learn to love each other again? Have you seen any family movie made in the past 15 years?) Grandma Delia is as self-absorbed as ever, with O’Hara’s five years as Moira on Schitt’s Creek adding fresh layers of narcissism, but Grandpa Charles has been dispatched in a dandy stop-motion shark attack and occasionally wanders through minus a head, obviating the need to rehire the tarnished Jeffrey Jones.

Back in the bureaucracy of the undead, Betelgeuse is overseeing the local shrunken-head call centre, until he gets word that his ex-wife Delores, a soul-sucking succubus (not a metaphor), has pulled herself back together (not a metaphor) and is gunning for him (a metaphor). Delores is played with witchy authority by Italian movie star Monica Bellucci, which gives Beetlejuice Beetlejuice a needed touch of demented class.

Did I mention the undead actor-turned-cop played with extra-strength mustard by Willem Dafoe? Or Jeremy (Arthur Conti), Astrid’s adolescent love interest, who may have a trick or two up his sleeve? All this to-ing and fro-ing is, in a sense, a betrayal of the first Beetlejuice, which didn’t have a storyline so much as a collection of bizarrely hilarious scenes stuck together with Edward Gorey-esque creativity, enjoyably cheap Claymation effects and a great deal of enthusiasm.

Catherine O'Hara is back as the 'lavishly pretentious' artist Delia Deetz. Photo / Warner Bros

For what it’s worth, the double-headed sandworms are back, and Keaton brings a scrofulous, lowdown energy that’s a delight to witness in a man well into his Medicare years. He’s still Betelgeuse; he’s never stopped being Betelgeuse, just as Ryder has never really stopped being Lydia amid all the stranger things in her career. O’Hara, of course, is a living legend.

And Burton? The sad-boy outsider artist of Edward Scissorhands (1990) and the Gothic Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) has long since seen his dark visions absorbed safely into the mainstream and his weirdness nullified by acclaim. That’s what made the original Beetlejuice unique: It was funny, unpredictable and weird. The Day-O dinner party from that film is a moment that lives on in pop culture, endlessly rewatchable on YouTube for its sheer bananas-ness, and the song’s reprise in the sequel is clever and welcome. But the attempt to top it in the climax with a beloved bit of 60s/70s cheese-rock mostly feels forced.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is at its best – which is more often than you’d think – when it relocates that vein of gonzo surrealism and at its deflated worst whenever it sticks to the story. It’s sprightly enough to make a lot of audiences and Warner Bros bean-counters happy, but it also confirms that one of the most distinct visionaries in American film history has become a corporate repurposing machine. It’s not insane, and that hurts.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is screening in New Zealand cinemas from September 5.