Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Despite online proclamations throughout the social-media-sphere that the decades between the original Beetlejuice and the recently released sequel should have spurred fans to steel themselves for something awful, there really isn’t any good way to brace oneself for the level of bad achieved by director Tim Burton in his newest film. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a mess, from Burton fumbling a ripe opportunity to meaningfully explore generational wounds to the half-baked fleshing-out of the office-like environs of the afterlife and beyond. Oh, how it hurts.
In Burton’s newest, we catch up with Lydia (Winona Ryder), who has turned her ability to see ghosts into a popular reality show. Lydia has anxiety like woah and her boyfriend Rory (an campy-but-not-in-a-fun-way Justin Theroux) isn’t helping; her haircut remains the same as ever for some reason. When Lydia’s father dies, however (don’t worry—known sex offender Jeffrey Jones doesn’t appear in the film, though his likeness does in photographic and animated forms), she must return to the house that started it all with her stepmom Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega). And since Beetlejuice himself (Michael Keaton) is somehow tied to that house and the model of the town that dwells within its attic, all hell breaks loose when his former lover—a ghost played by an underused Monica Bellucci who can suck the souls out of even the dead for some reason that is never explained—returns, leaving ol’ BJ to try to infiltrate the land of the living through trickery and jokes.
As if that weren’t already too complicated, Lydia’s daughter develops a crush on a boy from town (Arthur Conti, whoever that is), and as anyone who has ever watched a movie can tell you, there’s something weird going on there.
Keaton is still excellent as the ghost with the most, though his screen time feels sorely lacking as Burton haphazardly tries to focus his film on Lydia. How disappointing to see the character evolve from a strange and fearless goth into a shrinking caricature of anxiety to whom things just seem to happen. Ryder’s performance is baffling, too, from her constant shrugged-shoulders delivery to her hackneyed presence as an expositional device. O’Hara doesn’t fare much better, either, as a watered-down version of her popular Moira Rose character from Schitt’s Creek. Ortega’s Astrid mostly pouts. Even worse, Burton traipses right up to the idea of how our familial relationships are a terrible, beautiful struggle only to drop the concept outright in favor of antics.
Keaton, then, becomes our last hope as not even Willem Dafoe’s absurdist ghost cop character can liven the mood. And though many Keaton moments come close to capturing the essence of the 1988 progenitor film, they still don’t answer why Burton made this movie. The likely explanation is that he knew we’d all pay to go see it. Which we did. Big time. But other than musician Danny Elfman’s canny updates to his original score and a few enjoyable aesthetic and decor choices, the smarter move would have been to leave the IP un-exhumed. The whole thing just feels cynical.
4
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Directed by Burton
With Ryder, O’Hara, Ortega, Conti, Dafoe and Keaton
Violet Crown Cinema, Regal, PG-13, 105 min.
