PLOT: After the death of her father, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) returns to her family home in Winter River with her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), in tow. Once there, she becomes plagued by visions of a certain “ghost with the most,” who has problems of his own.
REVIEW: For a while there, you couldn’t have been blamed for thinking Tim Burton had maybe lost a bit of his touch. He had a long run of mediocre movies that climaxed with Dumbo, a movie the director hated so much it almost made him quit the business. However, watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, it can’t be denied that returning to his old stomping grounds by making a sequel to his first mega-hit, Beetlejuice, might have been just what the doctor ordered, with it his most energetic, playful, and creative film in years.
In it, Burton is wise enough to play the hits to a certain extent, as it is not all that different from the original. Yet, by doing a movie that’s so deliberately old school, with practical effects, rude humor, and WAY more gore than you’d expect from a PG-13 movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice almost feels transgressive by how much it plays to the strengths of its director and cast, and discards the trappings of most modern blockbusters.
While it’s been decades since they played their iconic roles, the three returning cast members, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O’Hara, are as game as ever, with Ryder’s Lydia now a celebrity psychic who’s somewhat famous for her brushes with the paranormal, even if her own daughter thinks she’s a fake. When Jenna Ortega was cast, everyone assumed she’d be playing a Goth girl riff, just like her on-screen mother did, but she actually plays against type, with Astrid, a skeptic who has no interest at all in ghosts or the paranormal. Moreover, she despises her mother for saying she communicates with the dead, as her own father passed some years back, and she resents his loss.
It’s an interesting, heartfelt approach for Burton and his writers, with Catherine O’Hara’s Delia somewhat humanized this time, too (but not too much), giving the movie some legit heart. But then again, everyone just wants to see Michael Keaton to some extent, right? They won’t be disappointed, with Keaton absolutely on fire and never missing a beat in his long-awaited return. Despite being thirty-six years older, Beetlejuice looks about the same (although they gave him a middle-aged paunch Keaton himself doesn’t have), and his energy level is off the charts. In it, he’s still obsessed with Lydia and bent on reclaiming her, as she had promised to marry him in the first film. But, he’s got a problem with his former wife, Monica Bellucci’s Delores, now a soul-sucking ghoul who wants revenge, as he killed her many centuries ago in his former life.
While Keaton’s the show, Burton himself works overtime to deliver a high-energy romp, with it as musically driven as the first, including a great sequence where Bellucci stitches herself together to The Bee Gees’s “Tragedy” and a climax scored by Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park” that tries to outdo the first movie’s “Day-O” scene. Add to that Willem Dafoe as a former TV cop now working as an underworld detective, a scenery-chewing Justin Theroux as this movie’s answer to the first film’s Otho, and a surprisingly bittersweet (and deft) handling of the movie’s complicated Jeffrey Jones situation, and you’ve got a sequel that’s a whole lot better than any of us were anticipating.
Truth be told, I was wary of a Beetlejuice sequel, as I figured they should leave well enough alone after thirty-six years. But, once Danny Elfman’s score kicked in, and I got a look at returning production designer Bo Welch’s sets, I was all in on a sequel I had a total blast with. This one is a very pleasant surprise. Here’s hoping this isn’t the last time Burton says Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.