So good they named it twice?
36 years after he was last cast back into the afterlife, guess who’s back again to cause trouble? If you’re still struggling to guess, the title Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will get you there twice. That sorts out who’s back (and we’ll cover who’s very not back later) but as to why he’s back, that may still elude you, even after watching the film.
This sequel picks up with Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) now a parent herself, dealing with an estranged daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), an increasingly eccentric artist mother (Catherine O’Hara), a lecherous producer (Justin Theroux) and a career as a TV spiritualist. But it’s when Beetlejuice’s ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci) escapes and goes on a killing spree, pursued by afterlife detective Wolf Jackson (Willem Defoe) that wackiness ensues, as the Deetz family return to Winter River to bury the recently deceased Charles.
If that sounds like there’s a lot going on, it’s because there is. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a movie of many subplots, not all of which are entirely necessary – but then again none of this is necessary. The original Beetlejuice served as a triumphant tombstone on its own perfectly well for over three decades and while it’s nice to catch up with (nearly) everyone again, it would also have been perfectly fine to let this IP R.I.P.
Of course, Jenna Ortega fits right in, like a hand in a typecast glove, her sardonic wit and goth sensibilities make her a perfect if obvious proxy for Ryder’s Lydia. Fair play to Ortega for refusing to phone in the role even if it doesn’t demand much from her apart from a warmed-over reprise of her Wednesday schtick but it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for her and hope that she’ll finally be offered roles that stretch her undoubted talents beyond bleak and moody. Winona Ryder manages to honour Lydia’s youth while breathing a new middle-aged perspective into a character who’s spent her life with one foot in the grave while Catherine O’Hara positively delights in her amplified Delia Deetz, now a wildly successful and somehow more unhinged multimedia artiste. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice certainly makes a choice in how it handles the unavailability of disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones, archly putting him front and centre in terms of story without ever fully showing the character beyond mutilated cadaver and a few old stock photos. Having signed away his character likeness (alongside the rest of the cast) during the first movie, you can rest assured that Jones won’t receive one cent for his “appearance” in the film, should such things bother you. The treatment of Geena Davis’ and Alec Baldwin’s Maitlands is, ironically, far more cursory and dismissive.
But the movie’s not called Deetz Deetz, so what of the title character? It’s little surprise that an actor as accomplished as Michael Keaton can roll back the years and inhabit the withered, mouldy corpse of Betelgeuse without missing a beat, albeit with a little less time in the make-up chair to add the wrinkles of six centuries’ worth of debauchery. He’s as charismatically anarchic and repellently alluring as ever although he sometimes feels like he’s often sidelined in his own movie as Burton seeks to juggle so many competing storylines. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of a movie, albeit it one where the creature’s been assembled with a few too many extraneous limbs. Theroux, Bellucci and Dafoe are all underserved by the overstuffed narrative while Arthur Conti is positively steamrollered by his pivotal but barely articulated plot. Each of them – well, certainly Bellucci, Conti and Dafoe at least – are worthy of being the focus of a Beetlejuice sequel all by themselves but the decision instead to have all these disparate storylines converge in a disappointingly uninspired reprise of the finale of the first movie just reinforces the feeling that this sequel was born of boardroom demands rather than artistic inspiration.
One of the film’s real joys, though, is the way it manages to retain the tangible aesthetic charm of the original. The practical effects, stop-motion oddities, and meticulously crafted sets that define Burton’s earlier style are all present with CGI mercifully used with a light touch, allowing the world to feel lived-in, strange, and filled with Burton’s handmade madness. The afterlife’s red tape and bureaucracy are expanded, albeit not in a particularly coherent and cohesive way, which may be a sign that something, incredibly, was actually held back in the hopes of a threequel somewhere down the line.
