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    • Tim Burton sequel charming (though unnecessary)
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    Tim Burton sequel charming (though unnecessary)

    Vaseline Posted on

    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in theaters from Friday, September 6. This review is based on a screening at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.

    In the pantheon of obligatory legacy sequels, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is perhaps the least necessary – after the first Beetle juicethere was little story or world-building left to explore (though that didn’t stop the animated series and years of sequel speculation). But that’s partly why Tim Burton’s follow-up to his beloved 1988 horror comedy works. At no point does the 36-years-later revival advertise itself as capital-I “Important,” even as it lends a sense of weight and grandeur to existing characters and events. Though it has considerably less story than the original—which it saved with its tongue-in-cheek tone and imaginative production design despite its narrative insignificance—every decision Burton makes here is simply aimed at having cartoonishly macabre fun in the vein of its predecessor. It’s fine—at times, even charming—and it doesn’t need to be much more than that.

    Decades after her first encounter with the strange and unusual, former antisocial goth Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) now uses her sixth sense to host the hit paranormal TV series Ghost House. With the help of her overzealous boyfriend/manager Rory (Justin Theroux), she’s become a minor celebrity, but the past still has a hold on her, and not just because she’s sporting the same updo and spiky bangs she wore as a teenager. Every time Lydia sees a black-and-white striped outfit, she has a flash of the undead bio-exorcist and sex pest Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), who tried to forcefully marry her in the first film.

    Lydia’s issues, however, run much broader than the previous film-induced PTSD that plagued her counterparts in other legacy sequels, like the final two Scream films or David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy. Her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, speaking of Scream), who dismisses her mother’s claims to the supernatural, is otherwise a mirror image of the moodier Lydia circa 1988; the death of Astrid’s father only drives a further wedge between them. Lydia’s stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) remains a self-absorbed concept artist, only now on a much grander scale. And her own father, Charles, has recently died in a comically gruesome manner, which feels like an ironic dig at actor Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles in the original before he was later charged with child pornography. Naturally, the actor doesn’t return for the sequel, but his character’s downfall is told extensively via CGI-enhanced stop-motion.

    On the one hand, pushing Jones to the curb so openly feels like a righteous, metatextual middle finger to an actor whose misdeeds also retroactively sully Burton’s Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow . On the other, it also calls attention to the fact that Burton hasn’t stopped working with composer Danny Elfman, the subject of multiple sexual harassment and assault lawsuits , whose signature, bouncing brass is as recognizable as his name on Beetlejuice ’s opening credits. Furthermore, no one really takes Charles’s death seriously under Jones’s approach—though a few characters pretend otherwise for personal gain—which also proves a little awkward. His demise, after all, is what brings these scattered characters back together in the old Maitland/Deetz house that was the setting of the first film. Burton has always danced around death or poked fun at it, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does so while also earnestly attempting to confront grief, in the form of Astrid’s lack of closure with her father. Combined with the film’s surprising in-world explanation for the Maitlands’ absence (ghost couple Adam and Barbara, played by Alec Baldwin and Beetlejuice’s Geena Davis), it feels like the sequel is constantly teetering on the edge of, even as it continually strays away from, a more thoughtful and reflective approach to mortality.

    The tonal mismatches are forgivable, however, once the film’s wacky supernatural antics begin. Betelgeuse, who hasn’t stopped pining for Lydia, still services deceased people who want to get rid of living guests in their former homes, and has now expanded his business to include the help of dozens of hulking assistants with shrunken heads and swollen plastic eyes—just one of the many delightful practical effects that make Beetlejuice Beetlejuice an ideal gateway into the horror genre for younger viewers. It also happens that Betelgeuse’s long-dead and long-disfigured ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), escapes from her confinement in the afterlife and rejoins her body parts in the hopes of exacting revenge on him with her demonic, soul-sucking powers.

    These storylines don’t collide so much as touch by chance—Bellucci, who is utterly devoted to her character’s gimmick, has frustratingly little screen time—but each is silly enough to warrant a laugh. Willem Dafoe, for example, plays deceased B-movie actor Wolf Jackson, whose obsession with playing a TV cop has led him to form a post-mortem “Ghoul Squad” of dead, blue-skinned cops who might as well be suffocated Super Troopers. Wolf hunts down rule-breakers like Betelgeuse (or living people who force their way into the afterlife, as happens here), while coming up with lame action-movie jokes on the spot. Dafoe is clearly off the charts in his own film, one that bears little connection to the rest of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice —which, for one, features a romantic subplot for Astrid plucked from a YA novel—but like most actors, the Spiderman actor has infectious fun.

    Every decision Burton makes here is aimed at a cartoonish, macabre fun in the style of the first film.

    That’s the nature of the film as a whole, even if the puzzle pieces rarely fit. Characters and storylines are often dropped in at random – like Athens‘s Sami Silmane as a recently deceased graffiti artist—making them little more than a showcase or an exhibit. The afterlife’s bureaucracy isn’t so much a central joke this time around as an incidental setting, but Burton and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (who, along with Ortega, make this as much a Wednesday reunion as a Beetlejuice sequel) provide enough macabre puns and gruesome visual gags to make their fleeting presence worthwhile. (A character who casually mentions feeling “lightheaded” may be the film’s funniest joke, for reasons best discovered in the theater.)

    The clash between trippy set design (à la Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and boring bureaucracy are the defining characteristics of Beetlejuice’s underworld. But while it retains its analog charm, the sequel also features Burton’s attempts to update both its setting and its vocabulary. Sometimes this works wonders, with self-absorbed characters like Rory using therapy-speak to hide their true intentions (Theroux may well be the film’s comedic secret weapon). Other attempts, unfortunately, aren’t nearly as character-driven; they play like half-hearted stabs at the internet, influencers, streaming, and social media, and are far less effective.

    But despite these uneven attempts to reckon with a changing world, Burton (perhaps rightly) doesn’t try to modernize Betelgeuse by undermining or “correcting” him, nor does he double down on the character’s creepiness by sending him after another teenager. He’s still a nasty devil, and Keaton plays him with the same unapologetic mischief he did in the first film, only this time around he’s up to some crazier, monstrous tricks, instead of a penchant for underage girls – if only because Ryder is now in his fifties.

    Granted, what gets lost in the process is the realization of one of the film’s central themes, namely Lydia seeing herself in Astrid and trying to protect her from the experiences she’s now living with. But that’s far too serious a story for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – a film whose characters dismiss the idea of ​​“trauma” as some kind of trendy, modern invention – even if it might be the right one. It’s a silly sequel to an equally silly original, and it’s hard to imagine wanting or needing much more than this.

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