Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

There were two primary elements which made for the charm of the original Beetlejuice thirty-six years ago. The primary one is what audiences would become well acquainted with over Burton's following decades: his grim, Gothic, German expressionist sense of style. His love of extremely angular architecture, his fascination with death and love for the outcasts who can see past the world's slick veneer, his imagination for the macabre and horrifying, and his ability to realize the strangest elements in gorgeous stop-motion, making them all the more otherworldly. His second feature established all of this as recurring themes of his artistic output, ensuring his position as a favorite of moody teenagers everywhere for decades to come.

Equally as important to its function, though, was its wide-ranging satire. Delia and Chuck are obvious targets, being the out of touch parents, one an insufferable and self-involved artist, the other obsessed with squeezing every bit of value out the properties he manages. The bureaucratic, office-centric nature of the afterlife is a wonderfully fresh way to express the deep 80s critique of the supremacy of business under Reagan. Maybe most important is that Lydia doesn't escape: sure, she's a goth icon, but much of the humor and memorability of her character is just how absurdly extreme she is, wearing a veil to the dinner table and writing a performatively dramatic suicide note.

So, as with most legacyquels, Burton's abandoned most of that in favor of simply returning to the world of the original and pointing at things you loved long ago.

That's not entirely fair. He does try a bunch of new things that set this entry apart both in theme and structure. It's just that most of them don't really work, and those that do end up going nowhere. Re-introducing us to Lydia (Winona Ryder) as a TV medium cashing in on her paranormal abilities presents a great opportunity to further critique modern society's obsession with monetizing every skill you have...but is never addressed again. Astrid (Jenna Ortega) caring deeply about the fate of the world while simultaneously being frustrated by her family is a fantastic update of the nihilistic disposition of her mother at her age...but again, it plays no role in the plot. The only drum the movie starts beating early and never drops is that Lydia's boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) is a weenie because he's a sensitive, modern man, eager to talk about feelings and to provide comfort, and he's got the mini-ponytail to prove it. Which...sure, I guess that's a take. At least ten years late to the party, but maybe it still could have worked if anyone was characterized strongly enough to contrast him, rather than his annoying behavior forming the entirety of the incredibly limp jokes.

The instinct to lean hard into characterizations isn't bad. But in the case of Delia (Catherine O'Hara), it's rehashing the same beats as the original, and means any scene with her and Rory causes physical pain. And it doesn't transfer to anyone else in the expansive cast. By largely downplaying the most central elements of their personalities, Lydia and Astrid are drained into fairly generic mother and daughter archetypes with a contentious relationship to fit, especially given the absence of her father, who passed away before the film begins and stubbornly refuses to appear to Lydia.

But the fundamental issue with the film is how overstuffed it is. There are half a dozen disparate plot lines opened up over the first half which all come together in an uninspired climax, ensuring that none of them have enough space to develop or capture our interest in the meantime. The possibility of Beetlejuice's Frankenstein-esque ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci) catching up to him means little to us when she's been on screen for all of two minutes before it happens. Actor Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), forever stuck in his final movie role, gets a bit more time to establish himself as a detective trying to track down both her and Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). While Dafoe probably does the most to liven up the proceedings, hamming it up to a delightful extent, nothing he does matters enough to truly leave an impression.

As for the "Ghost With the Most", Beetlejuice lands as a tired retread. Keaton (understandably) doesn't have the energy to jump around and be quite as manic as he was before, rendering him mostly inert. Burton pulls way, way back in his writing of the character, mostly forgoing his aggressive and lecherous behavior, making him much less gross and threatening. It's as if he knows the character is beloved and doesn't want to risk challenging that. Additionally, he feels far more present in this outing, regardless of screentime. All of which sets up Delores to be more Beetlejuice than Beetlejuice, until she...well, isn't.

Of course, the production design is excellent: Mark Scruton and company were afforded myriad chances for extensive creativity given that we see so much of the afterlife. Much of it is practical, and they manage to capture the vibe of the original. There are a handful of elements which needlessly invoke it, most noisily the Dr. Caligari inspired hallway with the lone janitor (Danny DeVito in a fun cameo effectively reprising the Penguin), but they still look good. However, the VFX leaves a lot to be desired. It's not particularly bad: sure, there are some instances of mediocre compositing, but I can look past those. My biggest gripe in this area is that many of the fantastical elements are either done in CGI, or else they cleaned up the stop-motion so much in post-production that it lost the jerkiness which gives the medium its characteristic, tactile feel. Imagery like the sandworm became so iconic that to see it so crisply here renders it a pale imitation of Burton's own previous work.

As with so many sequels, the movie doesn't satisfy the question of why we needed to go back to this world, and the director didn't have anything new to say. It's not the most artistically bankrupt entry in a summer made of sequels, and when this much is hurled at the wall, some of it is guaranteed to stick. The two Soul Train sequences are a strange yet not unwelcome element of a movie this pasty white, and I appreciate the struggle they place in front of Lydia, even as it mostly fails to work and leaves no one with a proper arc. But Burton clearly lost his fastball long ago, and sadly, returning to familiar ground hasn't aided in reclaiming it. It may have served to highlight just how definitively his once bright star has dimmed.