BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE – Review by Valerie Kalfrin
To enter the underworld, we learned from the original Beetlejuice, you need to draw a door. In the new film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Michael Keaton’s maniacally mischievous demon draws a cartoonish bomb complete with a long fuse, all the better to blow us away.
Twenty-six years after Keaton and director Tim Burton introduced this madcap “ghost with the most,” an underworld rogue who claimed he could scare away the living, the two have reunited for a sequel stuffed with macabre humor, immersive world-building, and eye-popping (and sometimes gut-spilling) special effects, costumes, and makeup.
While the plot feels overstuffed at times, introducing threads and characters it works hard to cohere, the resulting concoction put a smile on my face.
Much like that bomb Beetlejuice detonates (when he’s trying to be sneaky, no less), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice pulls out all the stops, as if anything less would have seemed too tame. Beetlejuice himself is a go-big-or-go-home kind of guy, after all, though it’s questionable whether he ever truly leaves.
Picking up decades after the end of the original film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice sees Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder, Stranger Things), the once “strange and unusual” girl who saw ghosts, as a black-clad TV host who communicates with the dead. Her teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega, Wednesday), barely speaks to her, not understanding why Lydia can purport to see all these other ghosts but not Astrid’s late father. Meanwhile, Lydia keeps catching glimpses of Beetlejuice, who tried to marry her as a teen.
Beetlejuice, now managing a group of scene-stealing shrunken-head guys all named Bob, is still smitten with Lydia but also on the run from his ex, Delores (Monica Bellucci, Dear Paris), a literal soul-sucker he foiled on their wedding night while dying in the process. Considering Beetlejuice unfinished business, Delores reanimates—and reconnects her scattered parts—soon after Lydia’s father, Charles, meets his demise.
A tip of the hat to writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar for how they separate the character of Charles Dietz from disgraced original actor Jeffrey Jones. Charles’s death—hilariously depicted in Claymation—sends the character to the wacky underworld while returning Lydia and Astrid to the Deetz’s Vermont homestead, alongside Lydia’s fussy producer beau Rory (Justin Thoreaux, White House Plumbers) and Lydia’s artist stepmother, Delia (a riotously kooky Catherine O’Hara, The Wild Robot).
As the underworld cops investigate the deaths in Dolores’s wake and Astrid strikes up a potential love connection with an emo teen (Arthur Conti, House of the Dragon), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice might feel like it has one plot thread too many. But all the ideas Burton and company juggle come together just right, thanks to the film’s marvelous visual flair, its go-for-broke attitude, and the performers’ infectious joy. There’s more than one musical number here, too, from Danny Elfman’s score to a celebration of those bound for the Elysian Fields and elsewhere grooving as they board the Soul Train.
Ryder brings an endearing weariness and maturity to Lydia, who’s haunted by her visions and exacerbated by her daughter. “Where’s the obnoxious little goth girl who tormented me years ago?” a bemused Delia asks her, not unkindly.
Keaton’s Beetlejuice is a little thicker around the middle but no more self-conscious, a mix of voracious need and confidence who eagerly manipulates reality. “I love a good dream sequence,” he quips at one point between a musical sequence and visuals of one pun after another.
Rounding out the zany ensemble is Willem Dafoe (Kinds of Kindness), having a blast as Wolf Jackson, an actor who died while playing a cop who has taken on that role in the afterlife. Jackson speaks in the clipped cliches of action movies while he swigs coffee and misses, his skull showing half a brain.
The hair and makeup artists, costumers, and effects team deserve special kudos, as does the art department, for giving this phantasmic fever dream a wondrous yet tactile, grounded feel. Between the underworld’s bureaucracy, sight gags among the deceased, and slapstick timing, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a rich comedic film that would reward a second watch.
