Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Films don't get much more innovative and fresh than 1988's Beetlejuice, with its practical effects that rely on everything from stop motion to puppetry, and a chaotic performance from Michael Keaton. Maybe that's why it's taken 3 1/2 decades to mount a sequel, and it took the people behind the smash hit Wednesday to finally make it happen. 

The Good: Michael Keaton is--again--the real star of the movie, delivering a manic performance that feels like a vaudeville act from hell. Winona Ryder, the Gen-X Manic Pixie Dream Girl Obsessed With Death, continues to ride the second (or is that third?) wave of success that Stranger Things has provided, and Catherine O'Hara remains to be one of the funniest people walking the planet. Tim Burton must have conducted a seance to commune with the version of himself which ceased to exist circa 2005, resurrecting the dark fairy tale storyteller that once gave us Edward Scissorhands. While BJBJ certainly uses CGI and modern technology, it also has a fair amount of animatronics and practical elements that take us back to the magic of the first film. It's a return to a universe we know and love. Add in Danny Elfman's iconic "oompa oompa" march and you've got yourself a trip down spooky memory lane. 

The Bad: the screenplay is a mess. It's too busy and tries to serve too many masters. I'm still not really sure why Jenna Ortega is in this movie, other than the fact that the screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (also the creators of Smallville) made her a superstar with Wednesday and she's catnip for the under 20 crowd. Ortega is a lure for the youth audience while also serving as a stand-in for the part Ryder played in the first movie--the death-obsessed teenager who thinks the world is a cruel place and every adult is a moron. But Ryder is still here as the same character and she still sees dead people, so it's somewhat redundant. Ortega's role feels like an executive mandate that this movie must have a torch-passing element so that if they ever make a third one--and certainly Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Beetlejuice Cubed?) is in development--Ortega can be an anchor for future stories without the rest of our beloved cast. It all feels so very corporate.

But thankfully, most of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice avoids the unnecessary sequel/reboot/tentpole trap, even when it is echoing and outright reheating things we enjoyed from the first movie. Modern filmmakers and studio executives have tricked the audience into buying movies we've already seen and that's what they've done here too. We've got world-weary teenager, the incompetent authority figures, and the slow build to Beetlejuice's arrival where he ultimately saves the day as an anti-hero. We've got the lip-synced musical number, the wedding with our heroine in a red dress, and we've got the yuppie who's chasing cash and needs to learn a lesson, too. Like so many other sequels, BJBJ takes elements that we already know from the first movie and dresses them up in new clothes. Thankfully, it also expands what we already knew in the form of a Beetlejuice origin story, the addition of Monica Bellucci as a key player in BJ's afterlife, and more insight into what happens in the bureaucratic hereafter. All aboard the Soul Train!

Ultimately, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is another sequel that relies more on serving up nostalgia than boldly forging ahead. However, because Michael Keaton is such an incredible performer and because it gets the band back together in an entertaining way, the laughs and the surreal chaos mask quite a few of the movie's sins. The world of Beetlejuice is ripe for exploitation--does anyone else remember the multi-season animated series that Tim Burton developed and executive produced back in 1989 that saw Lydia and Beetlejuice having adventures together as best friends? These characters have always been rubber enough to fit into different molds, and something tells me Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn't their last adventure. This is indeed a franchise film, but it's anarchic enough to not always feel like one.