‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Assessment: Michael Keaton Nonetheless Has the Juice

It took 36 years to conjure a Beetlejuice sequel into existence, and you may really feel each one of many numerous script drafts written within the intervening a long time within the completed movie’s plot, which is overloaded with superfluous characters and unnecessary subplots. The movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, is credited to only three writers (Aflred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith), however many others contributed to its improvement, all of whom struggled for many years to search out a believable and satisfying motive to reunite Michael Keaton’s undead trickster with Winona Ryder’s religious medium and goth icon.

The first movie actually didn’t demand a sequel. But Keaton’s Beetlejuice and the movie’s imaginative and prescient of the afterlife — which appears like a particularly imaginative haunted home at a grungy touring carnival — stay etched in followers’ minds in spite of everything this time. The pull of these parts had been sufficient to get Beetlejuice Beetlejuice made regardless of the plain script difficulties. And even with a slipshod story, these two key parts — Keaton and the realm of the “Recently Deceased” — work simply as nicely in 2024 as they did in 1988. Keaton nonetheless has the juice (and the Juice) to energy this long-awaited, deeply uneven sequel.

As within the first movie, Keaton is much less of the star than the instigator of chaos. The story facilities as a substitute on the Deetz household, primarily Ryder’s Lydia and her eccentric stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara). The sequel opens with Lydia on the verge of marrying her supervisor, Rory (Justin Theroux) an oily Svengali sort who exploits Lydia’s skill to see and talk with ghosts by pushing her to host a TV present about haunted homes.

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Lydia is uncomfortable with superstar, and equally unsure a couple of union with Rory. For one factor, a second marriage received’t assist her relationship together with her sullen teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who doesn’t consider in ghosts or in Lydia’s items. (Astrid’s father, Lydia’s first husband, died earlier than the occasions of the sequel.) For one other factor, Lydia retains seeing flashes of her outdated nemesis Beetlejuice (Keaton), who was the primary (undead) man to attempt to bully her into marrying him when she, Delia, and Lydia’s dad Charles first moved into their spooky nation residence some 30 years prior.

Then Charles dies — somewhat than clarify why, I’ll simply allow you to Google the actor who performed him in Beetlejuice, Jeffrey Jones. That units off a slew of further storylines. They embrace: Delia attempting to honor Charles’ reminiscence with a funeral worthy of his greatness (and her outsized ego), Rory pressuring Lydia right into a quickie marriage days after Charles’ wake, Astrid falling for an area boy (Arthur Conti) she discovers studying Dostoyevsky in a treehouse, and a schlocky actor turned afterlife cop (Willem Dafoe) investigating a collection of murders tied to Beetlejuice’s heretofore unmentioned ex-wife (Monica Bellucci), a literal soul-sucker hellbent on revenge towards her bio-exorcist hubby.

What do all these plots should do with each other? Oddly, not very a lot. Several of them could possibly be faraway from the movie totally with no unfavourable influence on the general movie — besides maybe for the truth that they might reduce on Keaton’s variety of scenes, and he’s the clear standout among the many forged. While all of the actors look comfortable to be quirking it up in director Tim Burton’s intricately designed underworld, most of them get little or no materials to work with. Bellucci and Dafoe each vanish for such lengthy chunks of time that once they lastly got here again I used to be taken fully abruptly: I had forgotten they had been within the movie within the first place.

All these extraneous narrative detours and actors simply serve to distract from the profitable components of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — specifically the connection between Lydia and Astra (which is itself a intelligent, karmic repetition of the fractious bond between Lydia and Delia within the unique Beetlejuice), and the curious connection they each share with Beetlejuice himself.

While Keaton is actually older than he was within the first movie, along with his make-up, wig, and that gravely voice, he appears and sounds mainly the identical. Aand he nonetheless brings the identical frenetic, dwell wire power to Beetlejuice’s sequences. He’s humorous, he’s unusual, he’s scary; he’s one of many nice movie characters of the ’80s, and it’s nice to see him once more.

Where so a lot of Tim Burton’s heroes are remoted, solitary outsiders, Beetlejuice appears to symbolize the filmmaker’s unrestrained id; the misfit who lashes out on the folks as a substitute of hiding away. (Or if he hides away, it’s as a result of somebody stated his identify aloud three times and banished him an enormous mannequin within the attic of an outdated home.) Beetlejuice’s weird mythology of ghosts and monsters don’t make a complete lot of sense — and it’s arguably much more complicated within the sequel — however due to Burton and his ghoulish creativeness, it’s at all times enjoyable exploring this place, with its nightmarish forms and hideous denizens caked in macabre prosthetics. (In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice I particularly just like the magician trapped inside one in every of his tips.)

The manufacturing design by Mark Scruton, with costumes by Colleen Atwood, is jammed with bizarre creatures, creepy creations, and pitch-black jokes. (Just wait till you see how souls make their means from their preliminary purgatory to “The Great Beyond.”) The eye sweet is nice sufficient that can assist you overlook the truth that the early scenes over-explain the plot (did Beetlejuice really want an origin story?) whereas many later ones go away vital questions completely unanswered. (The offhanded means the movie dispatches the Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis characters from the unique Beetlejuice actually made me a little bit indignant.)

It takes means too lengthy — practically an hour of a 105-minute movie — for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s precise story to emerge and for Keaton to take middle stage once more. Once he exhibits up, although, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice springs to life. Er, make that afterlife.

Additional Thoughts:

-The pointless characters don’t simply take in time; they go away little room for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to discover any new concepts. There’s a humorous gag the place one character tries to persuade Lydia that Beetlejuice is a fantasy she invented — “a assemble of your unpacked trauma,” they inform her. And for a second, it looks like this movie may even have one thing to say not solely about that topic, however about how seemingly each horror movie of the final 15 years is, at its core, a story about unpacked trauma. But there’s no time for that in a movie with two villains and eight wacky sidekick characters.

-Between this movie and Dune: Part Two, sandworms are having a second.

RATING: 6/10