Of all the late sequels to popular movies, decades after the original came out, was there any I could honestly say I was anticipating less than Beetlejuice Beetlejuice? Actually, yes: more often than not, I was never a fan of the original movies these late sequels are following up. Beetlejuice was honestly the rare exception. I’m on record for greatly enjoying Tom Gun: Maverick, Blade Runner 2049, and even Twisters far more than the originals. Beetlejuice was a movie I really liked when it came out. My hesitation here was less about not liking the first one as my general belief that director Tim Burton is not exactly making what many people would consider good movies all that often these days.
But Michael Keaton did come back, and if nothing else, I figure he’d probably be entertaining.
It’s been something like 30 years since Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) managed to avoid a marriage to renegade bio-exorcist Betelgeuse (Keaton), and since then, she’s used her ability to see ghosts to carve out a living for herself as the host of a TV show about haunted houses, all while in a relationship with her new age cheeseball manager/boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux). During a taping, Lydia gets a call from her stepmother Delia (a fantastic Catherine O’Hara) to inform her that Lydia’s father Charles (not Jeffrey Jones because of real life stuff) is dead. That means heading back to the ghost house where Delia plans to put on a big art installation about mourning Charles, and that means picking up Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) from a boarding school despite the fact Astrid wants nothing to do with her mother because Astrid doesn’t believe in ghosts, owing to something involving Astrid’s late father.
But there are other problems in the underworld as Betelgeuse’s ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci) has managed to pull herself together in the afterlife, and she’s a soul-sucker, a ghost who can suck away whatever keeps ghosts going in the afterlife. She’s got a bone to pick with her ex, and he might actually be afraid of her, but not enough to tell the truth to actor/ghost cop Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe). Between the strife in the Deetz household, Rory’s sudden marriage proposal, and Astrid’s desire to be anywhere but with her mom, there’s probably an opening there for a certain Ghost with the Most to cause more trouble. It’s not so much a question of if he will but how much and whether he can be stopped.
I had heard going in that this movie was actually one of Burton’s best in years. I wouldn’t quite put it on par with his absolute best, but it is absolutely one of his best in a long time. It may help that Burton is not working this time with intellectual property developed by someone else: he was there for the first Beetlejuice after all, and many of his other recent movies have seemed like little better than adaptations of other movies and TV shows, even for his successes like Netflix’s Wednesday streaming series. But here, he’s got the great weird visual design that highlights his best work as well as fun performances from Ryder, O’Hara, Dafoe, and especially Keaton. This sequel isn’t high art, but it’s entertaining.
In fact, I would argue that Burton’s best movies are often movies with these great visual styles and fun performances that cover up for some general narrative weaknesses. By contrast, his lesser work are ones where the visual style and performances can’t cover those weaknesses up. I can point to a couple places here that have those narrative issues, like the multitude of plot points, so many that seemingly important characters like Bellucci’s Delores seem to disappear from the movie for long stretches, and the replacement moment for the Banana Boat song’s supernatural lip syncing, while funny, may go on a bit too long. But this is a very clever movie, even going so far as to find a way to keep the Charles Deetz character in the movie without having to show Jeffrey Jones in person once. I wouldn’t put it on the same level as the other years-later sequels I cited above as movies I liked better than the first, and indeed, I do prefer the original movie in this case, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is still a delightfully fun movie in its own right.
Grade: B+
0 Comments