Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is More of the Same From the Least Surprising Filmmaker Alive

If you like lukewarm retreads from a filmmaker who has been cannibalizing himself for decades then boy are you in for a treat!

When I heard that Tim Burton would be releasing a sequel to Beetlejuice thirty-six long years after the release of his beloved second feature film, I naturally assumed that it represented a labor of love and a profoundly personal project. 

For three and a half decades, the Beetlejuice sequel must have occupied Burton’s every spare thought. It didn’t matter what film he was working on: at least eighty percent of his mind and his imagination were devoted to making a Beetlejuice sequel so undeniable and transcendent that it would make the original seem like a flaming pile of horse shit by comparison. 

Ed Wood and Nightmare Before Christmas might seem like projects that meant a great deal to Burton, but rumor has it that he drove the crew and visitors crazy by continually showing them his production drawings for a Beetlejuice sequel whenever he had a chance. 

He would talk colleagues’ ears off about how everything in his life and career was building towards a late-in-the-game Beetlejuice follow-up, how it would be his masterpiece, his manifesto, his magnum opus, and his enduring gift to the world.

For three and a half decades, creating the ideal Beetlejuice sequel must have obsessed Burton. Rumor has it the quest for perfection drove Burton mad, not unlike Francis Ford Coppola and Megalopolis. 

Burton knew that he could not repeat himself. Why would he? That would be antithetical to his aesthetic and worldview. It’s nothing but originality, originality, and originality, and blowing Square’s minds with freaky ass shit they’d never seen before. 

Take Wednesday. Who would possibly have connected Burton with, of all things, The Addams Family? When he pitched the show, executives must have shit themselves in shock over the crazy incongruity of Tim Burton, of all people, directing and producing a Wednesday-centered Addams Family spin-off starring Jenna Ortega. The stunned executives probably fainted from sheer surprise. They might have been so shocked that they died of heart attacks en masse.

It made no sense at all. It was a true marriage of opposites, but Burton made it work. 

For thirty-five years, Burton worked on the screenplay for the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Every year, it got better and better as the greatest scribes in our land (namely, the guy who wrote Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Killer, and The Hard Times of RJ Berger, an MTV show about a teen with a massive dong and the team behind Herbie: Fully Loaded and I Am Number Four) had a crack at what Burton would tell anyone who would listen was going to be the one he would be remembered for. 

Limply rehashing a past triumph is the last thing on Burton’s mind. Can you even imagine Burton doing that? Doing exactly what people expect to wildly diminishing returns? That’s not our Burton. He’d rather blow squares away with some next-level audacious Dark Shadows/Dumbo/Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children type shit. 

No one saw those movies coming. NO ONE. But those were other stories that Burton had to tell even if Hollywood threatened to turn its back on him and his apparent insanity.

Burton had to make a sequel to Beetlejuice. His soul angrily demanded it. It was another story that he had to tell. 

Burton had to tell the next entry in the Beetlejuice saga. I feel honored that he chose to share this bold vision with us. 

In Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deitz is no longer an iconic feminist goth badass but rather a cheesy television personality with a show where she communicates with supernatural apparitions, a resentful teenage daughter, and a wussy creep of a boyfriend/manager/fiance Justin Theroux, an addition to the cast but also a subtraction.

Lydia’s father dies a narratively convenient death, thereby sparing the filmmakers the bother of having to re-hire noted creep Jeffrey Jones or replace him. 

Catherine O’Hara returns as Delia Deitz, daffy artist, mom, and grandma. She is also easily the film’s greatest strength. Her mad matriarch was a proto-Moira Rose. She was Moira after Delia, and she brings more than a soupçon of Moira to her performance here.

She’s a spitfire who gets the film’s best lines and the least sappiness. Fleeting glimpses of Beetlejuice torment Lydia as she goes about her life. When Lydia learns that her rebellious daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) is taking up with a boy whose dark secret involves being a ghost and whose even darker secret involves homicide, she’s tempted to make a deal with the devil, or at least Beetlejuice, to save her daughter. 

Astrid’s jerky dead boyfriend says that he can reunite her with her dead father. Death will inevitably haunt a movie about the complicated relationship between the dead and the living, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is weighed down with lumpy, grief-inflected family melodrama and an unexpected and unwelcome sentimental streak. 

Willem Dafoe joins the shenanigans as an actor who played police officers during his eventful lifetime and moved on to working as a shamus in the afterlife in a subplot that’s mildly amusing but also seems to belong in a different movie. 

Despite what I assumed, Burton, his producers, and the screenwriters have not spent the last thirty-six years refining their vision for the underwhelming and overstuffed sequel. The Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter dude is only in his mid-forties, so he ostensibly would have been working on the film since he was ten.

The filmmakers do, however, seem to have spent much of that time dreaming up new characters and subplots that add nothing but time and unnecessary complications. 

Slapstick remains a young man’s game. Michael Keaton was seventy-two years old when he returned to a role he last played in his mid-thirties. 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is perversely, if predictably, intent on doing what it did before to diminishing results. Lip-synching sequences that try to replicate the magic of the original film’s classic “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” set piece feel particularly desperate and derivative. 

Thankfully, there’s still a lot of sleazy, vulgar energy to Keaton’s performance. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice suffers whenever Keaton is offscreen for too long. It needs his ribald rowdiness and fourth wall-shattering insouciance. 

Burton has a maddening habit of doing exactly what you think he’ll do exactly how you think he’ll do it. His aesthetic went from being a style to a straightjacket. He’s become one of our most predictable filmmakers. Everything that he does is on-brand. He’s incapable of surprises. 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn’t awful, but it feels exhausted and unnecessary. It's just another trip back to our collective past that lacks the macabre magic of the original. It has its moments, but it never comes close to justifying its existence. 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice passes the torch of icon teen gothdom from Ryder to Ortega the way it does everything: arbitrarily, predictably, and lazily. 

Ortega isn’t just the most obvious choice to play the teen heroine here; she was the inevitable and only choice as well. 

Judging by the film’s gaudy box office, there’s a sizable audience for more of the same. Then again, Alice in Wonderland made a billion dollars despite its staggering, dispiriting mediocrity. The same should hold true of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. 

As with The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice boasts so much nostalgic appeal that all it needs to do is not be terrible to make, at minimum, at least one billion dollars. 

For Warner Brothers’ bottom line, it’s probably best that it did not pull the trigger on Beetlejuice Goes Hawaain, a script that spent an eternity in development hell before being tossed in the circular file in favor of this lukewarm tribute to what came before.

I would prefer an insane, disastrous, gloriously misguided Beetlejuice to this bland competency/passable mediocrity.  

Threetlejuice has undoubtedly just been green-lit. I look forward to seeing Michael Keaton engage in slapstick shenanigans well into his eighties. Hopefully, he’ll continue to make us laugh with his zany physical comedy without breaking his hip. 

I left Beetlejuice Beetlejuice disillusioned. 

I assumed that Burton has spent decades diligently refining and reworking his beloved Beetlejuice sequel until it shone like the sun and radiated joy and laughter and life. 

Monica Belluci is Tim Burton’s girlfriend. He got much more out of her appearance here than the audience will.

I thought he was getting things perfect. I thought it would be worth the wait.

I was wrong. They didn’t make the movie because they had a perfect script that angrily demanded to be made. God would not have smote us down in rage if Beetlejuice Beetlejuice had not been made.  

I never thought I would write these words, but this late-in-the-game sequel from a fading filmmaker is lukewarm, devoid of inspiration, derivative, and self-cannibalizing to a depressing degree. 

Two and a half stars out