“I swear, the afterlife is so random,” Jenna Ortega’s angsty teen character Astrid Deetz grouses, deep into the action of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It’s meant as a tossed-off line, one of those “Well, that happened!” / “Ooh, that’s gotta hurt!” straight-to-the-audience statements that stand in for actual jokes. Instead, it lands like she’s saying the quiet part out loud, laying out a mission statement for the entire movie.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is fundamentally a series of chaotic visual gags and halfhearted character micro-arcs, all strung together at random. It’s a showcase for Burton’s anarchic sense of humor and love of comic caricature, a sequel built around callbacks to and echoes of the original 1988 movie. It’s another tick mark on the seemingly endless list of 2020s franchise installments that serve as belated victory laps for past comic triumphs, while blunting what was unique about those triumphs in the first place. But on its own, it isn’t much of a movie. At best, it’s half a story — which is much more baffling than if it were pure giddy nonsense with no discernible story at all.
The plot feels like the screenwriters (Smallville and Wednesday co-writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar) were only around for the first half of the project. The setup, at least, is full of specific character detail: Beetlejuice protagonist Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) has become a celebrated TV ghost-chaser and secret off-screen pill-popper, traumatized by her teenage experiences with Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), the “bio-exorcist” (ghost? Or demon? This movie says both) who terrorized Lydia’s family in the first movie. She’s estranged from her angsty teenage daughter Astrid, who feels Lydia spends too much time with her TV audience.
The space between them leaves room for three predators with their own agendas: Lydia’s oily manager Rory (Justin Theroux); local sad boy Jeremy (Arthur Conti), whose doe-eyed Dostoevsky fandom piques Astrid’s romantic interest; and of course Betelgeuse himself, who’s still obsessed with marrying Lydia, 30 years after their first encounter. All these men want something from the women in this story, and all three of them disguise ambition as romance. It’d be a clever parallel if the whole structure didn’t fall apart immediately after the setup.
There’s a vague whiff of emotion somewhere under all the ensuing nonsense, pinned in the idea that Astrid and Lydia each want each other’s love and attention, but can’t find common ground, given Astrid’s firm skepticism about ghosts and Lydia’s determination to keep her daughter away from the world of the dead. The ways both of them turn to other people and other pastimes to fill the holes in their lives might be poignant, if it all wasn’t so obviously a ploy to pack the film with more antic characters — none of whom Burton and the writers really commit to for more than a scene at a time.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a profoundly overstuffed movie, even with some of the legacy characters awkwardly shuffled off the stage. Lydia’s mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) is still a central figure, but her husband Charles (Jeffrey Jones, whose career ended with a child pornography scandal) conveniently dies in a comic accident, portrayed in stop-motion as a bid to keep the actor off screen. And original ghosts Adam and Barbara (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, who possibly knew better than to take Burton’s phone call for this one) “found a loophole,” evaded their mandate to haunt Lydia’s house for the next 125 years, and disappeared from the story.
To fill their spots, the sequel trots in a bunch of new faces, including Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson, a dead action-movie actor who treats his new afterlife-cop gig as just another hammy performance, and Monica Bellucci as Delores, a stitched-together ghost who wants to devour Betelgeuse’s soul. As a visual design, Monica is a straight-and-simple blend of Morticia Addams and Burton’s design for Sally in The Nightmare Before Christmas. As the movie’s main villain, she’s an absolute nothing — a few poses, a few visual effects, and no sense of threat whatsoever. She’s just another cold body running around in a maze with no entry and no exit.
That’s the real problem in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — Dolores, Rory, and Jeremy don’t get enough screen time or narrative space to become meaningful or memorable. No one does. The first half of the movie blurs by in a flood of character trivia that doesn’t matter and never comes up again. There’s no theme or throughline to any of the bits and bobs, like Astrid’s obsession with climate change and political advocacy, or Delia’s latest huge art project, which uses her body as a canvas.
A doggedly determined film-theory scholar might connect the ways the movie’s three generations of women are all trying to reassert control over their lives in a chaotic world — Astrid by focusing on the environment, Lydia by commoditizing and trivializing her unwelcome connection with the dead, Delia by literalizing her control over her own body. But none of these plot threads are important to the story or, past the introduction, to the characters. The competing plot lines crowd and flatten each other out. They ultimately devolve into a shared joint means to line up the cast for a rapid-fire tour of the afterlife, which everyone runs around like they’re pulling a Scooby-Doo door gag, except with more half-baked puns.
And then there’s Keaton, resuming the Betelgeuse role as if he never left it, smarming and swanning his way through a movie that has no room for his larger-than-life performance. The first Beetlejuice gets a lot of its energy from the tonal conflict between Baldwin and Davis’ sweetly hapless, hopeless fish-out-of-water ghost characters and Keaton’s gleeful yet kid-friendly malice, with Ryder caught in the middle as a classic Burton morbid-goth oddball. In the sequel, there’s no sense of that conflict: The whole world has taken on the riotous, ghoulish tone of Keaton’s character, and every player in this story feels like a thinly masked version of the same person. There’s no touch of sweetness in any of it, except maybe in the few bare moments when Astrid first meets Jeremy, and wonders if she’s finally found someone who understands her, as vaguely and broadly drawn as she is.
There’s a real sense that the screenwriters left the building after laying down the first hour of the movie, leaving Burton to fill in the rest of his run time with “Hey, remember that from the first film?” references. The stop-motion sandworms are back. The afterlife-as-hell-bureaucracy gags are back. The broad-shouldered, shrunken-head corpse is back, and now there are a lot more of them. Betelgeuse is still pulling his seen-from-behind face-exploding routine to freak people out. A child choir sings Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat (Day-O)” in a setting that makes not the slightest lick of sense as anything but a callback. Once again, a big lip-synched musical number is forced on a bunch of unwilling participants. It’s the laziest possible way to put together a sequel: nostalgia with only the barest minimal new spin on anything, right up to a climax that’s more or less the finale of the first movie with a few old names hastily crossed out and a few new ones scribbled in.
At his best, Tim Burton always excelled in finding the hint of sincere emotion at the bottom of his garish comedic nonsense: Edward Scissorhands’ longing to safely and securely fit into a family, Jack Skellington’s pure delight in the fresh new excitements of Christmas, Ed Wood’s authentic love of cinema and desire to make something beautiful and beloved. Burton’s characters used to stand out both for their unpredictable, cheerfully gruesome oddities and for the ways they channeled the relatable feeling of wanting to be accepted without necessarily having to conform. But there’s no sign of sincerity anywhere in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and no hint of relatable feeling. The entire movie is an echo chamber crammed with incident. As Astrid notes, it’s so random.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in theaters now.
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