Josh Reviews Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Decades after the events of the original Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is the host of a TV show about the supernatural (shades of Pete Venkman hosting World of the Psychic), and is somewhat estranged from her lonely daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega).  When Lydia’s father Charles dies, she and her family — including Astrid, her step-mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and her skeezy boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) return to the “ghost house” on top of the hill in the rural town of Winter River, Connecticut.  Of course, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) gets released again, though this time he’s on the run himself from someone even scarier: his formerly dismembered ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), who is out for vengeance.  Lydia and Astrid are caught in the middle.

I loved the original 1988 Beetlejuice as a kid.  The mix of comedy and Tim Burton’s unique brand of supernatural weirdness hit my sweet spot, and I watched it frequently.  I think that original film holds up well; I always enjoy watching it.  Crafting a satisfying “legacy” sequel to a much-loved film decades later is a difficult task.  More attempts fail than succeed.  And while the original Beetlejuice was my entry-point to the films of Tim Burton (and I still love many of his films: Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Mars Attacks!. Sleepy Hollow, The Nightmare Before Christmas), it’s been quite a while since one of Mr. Burton’s films has hit the mark for me.  So I was somewhat dubious going into this sequel.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t match the original, and it’s got a narrative messiness that bugged me (more on that below); at the same time, I loved being back in this world and with these characters, and I thought the film captures the spooky/silly tone of the original.  I loved seeing more of Tim Burton’s classic weirdness and listening to the score by Danny Elfman.  This isn’t groundbreaking cinema, but it’s a competently made, perfectly enjoyable Beetlejuice sequel.  I’m not evangelical about this film, but I am satisfied.

Their best move was introducing Lydia’s daughter and casting Jenna Ortega.  It feels correct that a Beetlejuice film should center on a somewhat strange, lonely young woman, and Ms. Ortega brings a pleasingly different spin to Astrid from how Ms. Ryder played Lydia back in 1988.  Ms. Ortega has terrific on-screen presence, and she performs a neat trick of allowing the audience to empathize with what she’s feeling even when she’s being obnoxious to our original Beetlejuice heroine Lydia.  It’s a terrific performance and a wonderful new character.  (Full disclosure: I think Ms. Ortega’s anti-Israel social media posts, accusing Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing, are awful.  Her heart is in the right place for caring about the suffering in Gaza, but I think her posts are not only factually incorrect but borderline Anti-Semitic.  I try to separate my opinions about her political viewpoints from my opinions about her as an actress.  Others may have an easier or harder time of doing that.)

It’s a pleasure to see Winona Ryder back as Lydia, and I’m glad that she’s given such a central role in the story.  It’s sad to think that Lydia’s happy ending at the end of the original Beetlejuice didn’t last, but it makes good story sense for a sequel film to re-enter Lydia’s life at a moment of crisis.  Ms. Ryder remains a fantastic actress and a confident on-screen presence.  I loved watching her.  (My only complaint is with the writing: I wanted to see Lydia have more of a character arc, and for her to move out of her passivity and indecision in the film’s first half and back into her spunky, confident self that we used to know.  Rather than having Beetlejuice get Rory to admit he’s a scumbag, I wish Lydia had been able to see that for herself and been more active in rejecting him.)

It’s also a pleasure to see Catherine O’Hara’s Delia not only back, but given such a major role.  Ms. O’Hara is on fire in this film, stealing every scene she’s in.  Delia is still funny and awful, but I love how they’ve softened her just a smidge here, so that she feels more like a human being and less like a cartoon.  We see that she genuinely does care for Lydia (something which we definitely did NOT see in the original film), which was a pleasant surprise for me.

Michael Keaton does a great job returning as Beetlejuice.  It’s hard to avoid noticing that Mr. Keaton is no longer a young man; one has to just move past that (even though Beetlejuice should be an un-aging dead creature).  The wonderful makeup effects help.  But it’s Mr. Keaton’s energetic performance that sells it.  This is still the same fast-talking, anarchic character we remember.

Justin Theroux (Wanderlust, The Leftovers) is a fun addition to the ensemble as Lydia’s boyfriend, TV show producer Rory.  Mr. Theroux is terrific at playing smarmy arrogance.  Willem Dafoe is great fun as Wolf Jackson, a dead detective on the hunt for Delores and Beetlejuice.  The idea that when Wolf was alive he wasn’t a real detective, but rather a movie-star who played a lot of detectives, is a great concept, and Mr. Dafoe milks that for a number of funny moments.  Monica Bellucci has great screen presence in her nearly-silent role as the vengeful Delores, though I wish she had more to do in the film.  Arthur Conti does strong work as Jeremy, a local boy who catches Astrid’s eye.  Burn Gorman (Pacific Rim) is very funny as the local reverend, Father Damien.  Santiago Cabrera (who was great in the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard, a bright spot in those otherwise disappointing seasons) is strong in an important role in the film’s third act that I won’t spoil here.  And Danny DeVito pops up for a fun cameo.

I’m going to get slightly SPOILERY in the next few paragraphs.  Nothing too major, but if you want to go into this film completely fresh, I suggest you stop reading here and return after you’ve seen it.

The film’s weakness is the script.  I wish it was funnier, and I wish the story was better structured.  This film is funny, but seldom laugh-out-loud funny.  It’s silly and amusing, but there are also a lot of groaners.  A scene in which Beetlejuice, pretending to be a therapist, says they have to spill their guts and then opens his chest to spill out his intestines is a good example of the type of humor in this film.  It’s not exactly A-level jokes.  It’s funny enough and it all works, but I’d bet some real comedy writers could have elevated this.  The script was written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar.  They created and ran Smallville, and they’ve been involved with a number of interesting projects over the years, but never anything that’s been as good as I wanted it to be.  (See also: Lethal Weapon 4, Shanghai Knights, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, etc.)  There’s a narrative wobbliness to the film that weakens it, in my opinion.  In the first film, we follow new ghosts Adam and Barbara Maitland through this wonky adventure; but here, the first act jumps around between various characters’ viewpoints (Lydia, Astrid, Beetlejuice, Delores) in a way that felt almost random as opposed to smooth.  Or take a look at the character of Delores.  OK, I can see why they thought it’d be a good idea to introduce a villain other than Beetlejuice himself.  But we spend the whole movie watching Delores slowly hunt for Beetlejuice, and being told she’s super dangerous and scary.  Then, in the end, when she finally catches up to Beetlejuice (and also Lydia and Astrid and everyone else) in the church at the end of the movie, she’s defeated in like two minutes.  It feels very anticlimactic.  Imagine this movie without Delores in it at all — the plot would barely have to change!!  That means her character wasn’t integrated into the story nearly well enough to be effective.  Things like this bring the movie down.

At the same time, as I wrote above, it’s fun to be back in this weird Tim Burton world!  I love seeing his stylized, slightly kooky and spooky visions on-screen.  This is easily my favorite new Tim Burton movie in many years.  Some of this is nostalgia, for sure.  It’s fun to be back in this Beetlejuice world and with these characters again.  It’s fun to see Sandworms again (which thankfully still have their stop-motion look from the first film), and all the other classic Beetlejuice iconography, from the newly-dead waiting room to the shrunken-head dudes to the Handbook for the Recently Deceased and lots more.  We even get some good new songs!  Nothing can equal “Banana Boat” (“Day-O”) from the original, but there are several very funny musical moments in this new film that I quite enjoyed.  (And we actually do get a very clever reprise of “Day-O” — it was spoiled in the trailers, but it still made me smile in the film.)

The only thing missing are the Maitlands themselves!  I was sad they didn’t include Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in this story.  It would have been fun to see them again.  I do understand their absence.  It’d be hard to disguise how much the actors have aged, which shouldn’t happen to them as ghosts.  And it is better for the story for Lydia and Astrid to feel more on their own, without the protective allies the Maitlands would have been.  Still, I wish the writers had found a better explanation for their absence.  We get one line about their having found a “loophole” that allowed them to move on, but that wasn’t satisfying for me; I wanted to know more.  Actually, that line is so ambiguous that I assumed the ambiguity was intentional and that we’d find out more about what really happened to the Maitlands in the film’s third act.  When that didn’t turn out to be the case, I was disappointed.

(I was not surprised that Jeffrey Jones was not involved in this film.  Mr. Jones played Charles Deetz in the original, but he is now a registered sex offender.  Ugh.  I laughed a lot at the various work-arounds they used in the film.  That was all very cleverly done.)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is sweet and funny and strange. It’s not a classic, but I enjoyed watching it, and I’ll consider that a victory.

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