‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’: Tim Burton’s Long-Awaited Sequel Is Fine Fine
Tim Burton was already a graduate of the Disney hard-knocks school of animation, a filmmaker with a few shorts under his belt, and the man who helped Pee-wee Herman go from underground favorite to alpha-manchild of ’80s cinema, when he begun working on his sophomore film: a 1988 horror-comedy about a Goth, some ghosts, and a particularly uncouth ghoul. Beetlejuice gave us our first introduction to the full, uncut Burton sensibility, in which the macabre and the madcap walked hand in hand while Michael Keaton ricocheted off the walls. It was spooky, kooky, and infused with a gleeful subversiveness. Burton would make darker movies (Sleepy Hollow), daffier movies (Mars Attacks!), more romantic movies (Edward Scissorhands), more personal movies (Ed Wood), and more popular movies (Batman). Beetlejuice, however, remains the first movie that springs to mind whenever someone says the term “Burtonesque.”
And now, 36 years later, a.k.a. an I.P. eternity, the Juice is once again loose — even if feels like the filmmaker himself isn’t. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the one sequel you’d always hoped Burton would get around to making, given how the premise of the dead dealing with DMV-levels of bureaucracy was so fertile and the worldbuilding surface felt barely scratched. He’s finally done it, and while this is anything but a DOA cash-in, there’s a weird sense of everything being either too stiff or several beats off the meter. It helps that most of the key players have returned, notably Keaton and Winona Ryder. And given the time gap, this isn’t the type of sequel to suffer from Contract Obligation-itis; you never doubt that Burton’s heart is 100 percent in it. It’s more like his magic touch with this type of material feels a little AWOL.
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What could bring the Deetz family back to that looming, haunted house in the quaint town of Winter River, Connecticut? The most obvious answer of them all: a death. It seems that the family’s patriarch, Charles, was in a plane wreck in the South Pacific while on a birdwatching expedition. The plunge into the ocean — he survived that OK. The shark attack right after that? Not so much. This bit of information, relayed through a stop-motion animation sequence that wouldn’t be out of place in a Henry Selick joint, does double duty, in that it kicks the plot into motion and allows the film to avoid dealing with the actor who played him. (When Charles does show up to that great big waiting room in the sky, he’s nothing but a walking, talking human-bite-mark, sans head. It’s … a thing.)
This bad news is passed along to Lydia Deetz (Ryder, heavenly), who’s parlayed her otherworldly talents to become the host of the reality TV show Ghost House. Along with her producer-slash-boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux, sleazy) and her mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara, screwy), they head to their country house to throw Charles what his art-world-celebrity widow calls a “grief collective.” On the way, they pick up Lydia’s daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega, spiky), from boarding school. She wants nothing to do with her mom, whose whole I-see-dead-people act is an embarrassment to her. The fact that Lydia can’t communicate with the one person from the world beyond that Astrid is dying to speak to — her deceased father (Santiago Cabrera) — only makes things worse.
Casting Ortega, whose tenure on Wednesday has already made her Burton royalty (he directed a few of the Netflix series’ episodes, though his sensibility infuses the show as a whole), is one of the few unimpeachable choices made here. It’s not just that she and Ryder play well together, and make for a believable mother-daughter combo; rather, Ortega’s ability to express vulnerability, exasperation, rage, and more via a world-class deadpan stare comes in handy when she’s passed the mantle of My So-Called Afterlife Goth-teen moodiness from Ryder. It also helps sell how she somehow keeps her cool after meeting a cute local named Jeremy (Arthur Conti). He has a lot of vinyl records of 1990s indie rock, recognizes a Dostoevsky quote when he hears one, and lives in a treehouse. Of course she falls for him!
Meanwhile, in the land of the dead, a box of spare body parts somehow spills on to a backroom floor and, thanks to sheer will and a staple gun, reassembles itself into a human form looking very much like Monica Bellucci. This Ms. Frankenstein’s Monster answers to Delores, and she has a nasty habit of sucking the souls out of those who cross her path. Her unexplained reappearance attracts the attention of Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), the toughest cop formerly alive. Actually, he’s simply an actor famous for playing Dirty Harry-style roles and who took pride in doing his own stunts, until, well … the exposed part of his brain peeking out from his skull fills in the blanks. Still, Jackson has cast himself as an afterlife action hero and is determined to crack the case. His main lead is some name she was overheard muttering: Beetlejuice.
Oh right, that guy! There’s twice as much business as usual happening in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and yet somehow half as much of Keaton’s gonzo title character as you’d like. Your memory might play tricks on you when it comes to how much the Ghost With the Most was around in the original, given the jolt his trickster gave the ’88 film every time he showed up. He’s only in a third or so of the picture, but every scene counted. Here, Beetlejuice gets to pine for his lost “love” Lydia, and grunt one-liners, and belch, and order around an army of shrunken-headed pals. Yet the afterlife’s No. 1 anarchist feels more like a peripheral presence than a protagonist, and though Keaton is still game to go big — really, truly, scenery-chompingly big — it feels like the character registers even less. He’s like the equivalent of one of Delores’ staples, there to connect a number of disparate storylines once everyone convenes to the underworld in search of Astrid, who ends up as the sequel’s de facto Eurydice.
You still get a handful of giddy high points, and a lot of callbacks: Here are the stop-motion sandworms, here is the waiting room filled with grotesquely funny visual gags, here are the skewed, checkerboarded hallways set designed by Dr. Caligari. Residual bitterness toward Disney shows up in the form of a punch line or three. There’s an attempt to do for Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park” what the first Beetlejuice did for Harry Belafonte’s “The Banana Boat Song,” and if the new supernatural sing-along fails to surpass this peerless ’80s slapstick set piece, it’s not for lack of trying. The nostalgia is indeed abundant, though we’ll take that over the under-served subplots (you could cut out all of Bellucci and Dafoe’s scenes, and the film would still play) and less-than-stellar new ideas (a train that transports souls dubbed the “Soul Train,” complete with 1970s dancers and Don Cornelius doppelg?nger, because why not?).
In other words, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a perfectly fine fine sequel, neither a total letdown nor a complete, shout-it-from-the-hills return to form for its creator. It’s a lot like listening to a better-than-decent cover band do remixed renditions of someone’s greatest-hits collection. Except the person behind all of it is, of course, the creator himself. Maybe our expectations were too high. Maybe we should have said his name — Burton Burton Burton — three times, and the filmmaker who did that beloved original would reappear, grinning maniacally and giving us something a bit less undead and a bit more alive.
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