’Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ review: Not quite dead yet

The ghost with the most is back in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which shows that even the dead can’t avoid age.

Long before David Zaslav radicalized a generation with his questionable management of the studio, Warner Bros. was already addicted to zombifying IP. No franchise is safe from an executive’s grubby mitts digging around the soggy old Sorting Hat prop and pulling out a big name property. As such, the most astonishing thing about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that it has taken so long to be the next one up on the chopping block. The second most astonishing is that against some sizable odds, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a solid follow up to the original 1988 horror comedy. The film is not better than its predecessor or the other major use of the IP in the past decade; but it is a worthwhile watch on its own merits.

Picking up over 30 years after the original film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finds Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) back in her classic black aesthetic but a whole different kind of unusual. Like the film’s target audience, she’s leveraging her childhood trauma for content in the form of a haunted house show. She’s also experiencing a bit of deja vu thanks to her own teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) having strong disdain for her and her new therapy speaking partner (Justin Theroux). 

Oh, and she’s seeing Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) all over the place. For his part, Beetlejuice is seeing his bio-exorcism business booming, even as he continues to pine for his former underage fianceé. A one-two punch of tragedy and a returning face from Beetlejuice’s past (Monica Bellucci) sets the whole cast on a collision course, though the way there is very haphazard. 

A packed but lean runtime keeps things lively

The script from well established duo Alfred Gogh and Miles Millar (with credit to Seth Grahame-Smith’s work a decade prior) packs quite a bit into a tight 104 minutes. Each member of the Deetz family finds themselves pulled all over the place. Lydia is dealing with both her obsessive boyfriend and Astrid’s expectations of her (not to mention her ghost-seeing abilities), at least until Astrid gets a separate plot of her own. The family’s step-matriarch Delia (Catherine O’Hara, giving Keaton a run for his money as a scene stealer) is still trying to evolve her art all while going through a truly emotional process. At the same time, Beetlejuice spends the first half of the film in the afterlife hiding from Bellucci’s character. 

Thankfully all these pieces do stay moving, fueled by a healthy amount of humor. The awkward inhumanity of Tim Burton’s later films isn’t in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Instead the film falls back on Keaton’s chaotic antics, O’Hara’s bourgeois persona, and the occasional decent practical effect to deliver much of the film’s jokes. While primarily a comedy, the laughs aren’t always hitting, and not every joke lands. The ones that do genuinely deliver belly laughs, but there’s also a lot of subtle ones that will only get chuckles on a rewatch. Everything involving Willem Dafoe’s actor playing a cop turned cop falls firmly into that category. 

Trying to recapture a vibe

While there are practical effects that do a lot to make jokes and build atmosphere, they aren’t all successful. There’s occasional moments that genuinely warrant shock and awe, particularly the introduction of Bellucci’s character — whose identity counts as a spoiler despite not having much to do overall — that comes away less like a ‘80’s Tim Burton effect and more like an ‘80’s Sam Raimi one. 

More often, the attempts to recapture the original Beetlejuice set design create a sense of cheapness. Sure, the locations look like a movie from 1988, but filtered through modern filmmaking without much effort to compensate. The sets are full of flat backgrounds. A film grain filter shows up only in certain scenes that make it all too apparent. An early sequence is full animation for little reason, and while it’s too competent to be AI generated, I’d be shocked if it isn’t accused of being so.

These culminate in a third act callback that tries so hard to capture the magic of stop motion techniques that Burton helped pioneer in his classics. But it’s not stop motion, and as a result is pretty embarrassing. It’s another moment of shock and awe, in a bad way. It’s fine if Burton wants to play the hits, but the result isn’t great. 

The film has (a realistic) heart.

However, these are not dealbreakers because Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does have more going for it than nostalgia. The film has some real heart and thought put into the characters that need it. Much of this is on Ryder and Ortega, the latter of which finally escapes her recent typecasting. Ortega showcases that she’s got range and isn’t just the second coming of her on-set mother. Ryder is surprisingly physical with her return to Lydia, using her entire body to communicate her millennial anxiety and decision paralysis. 

The plot operates in multiple smaller pieces, so each member of the cast gets to play off of one or two specific folks before the chaos switches their positions. O’Hara is the film’s MVP, reminding fans of why Delia Deetz was off-putting while making her even more engaging. She does not fit the traditional matriarchal role for the family, and that’s not a character flaw. She also gets to see the shoe on the other foot, being just as over Theroux‘s character. He’s just like her in many ways, just trading New Age nonsense for expertise in online therapy speak. He interjects the film with a sort of uncomfortably funny energy that Burton has been chasing in multiple films, this time successfully.

The bottom line.

It’s clear throughout that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn’t just a cash grab. Tim Burton is at least trying to get his groove back, and this film is much closer to his peak than more recent outings. Longtime fans of the original film won’t be disappointed, even as they won’t be too surprised either. Perhaps Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn’t the film of the fall, but it’ll sit nicely in the yearly Halloween rotations for those who care the most.  

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is now playing in theaters everywhere. You can watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. You can read more reviews by Travis Hymas here.