“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” Review

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There’s a marvel to the mess within this Beetlejuice legacy sequel. It aims with a familiar arsenal of the macabre and the absurd, with Tim Burton wielding this old material like a shotgun. The splatter would be annoying if it weren’t for Burton’s direction to smear the ensemble of dark hues in some clever ways. It’s a case of stylish horror designs trumping the toppling characters and plotlines, highlighting a classic case of Burton’s brilliance amid his manic direction.

There’s a lot going on in the realms of the living and the dead since we last saw Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). He’s got his own thing going on in the underworld, with his long-term goal seeking marital passage into the land of the living and his short-term one fighting off his vicious ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci). Meanwhile, in the land of those not yet dead, the Deetz family continues to be a dysfunctional unit. Lydia (Winona Ryder) still has visions of ghosts and has turned it into a career that she’s starting to regret. Her relationship becomes strained with her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and her romantic relationship to the scheming Rory (Justin Theroux) is a one-sided case of appealing to her trauma. All of them will be given the chance to reconnect when Lydia’s mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) summons them home for the funeral of her husband.

This movie is a mess, but a remarkably charming mess at that. The script itself is overstuffed with so many plotlines that they never have much time to breathe or develop their own chemistry. Delores, as an example, is treated like a standard femme fatale, more intimidating for the way she floats across the ground and staples her body parts together than anything personality wise. Astrid has a romance with a ghost that has its moments, but it doesn’t even start until the second act as the two speedrun a love-at-first-sight romance over two days. The only character who has one of the more complete arcs is Lydia, but with her mounting issues of grief, trauma, family, and love, she still feels like more of a passenger for Beetlejuice’s wild ride.

But what a ride it is! If the film really wants to dart all over the place, it at least finds the best areas to get lost within. Beetlejuice’s undead operations of an office employing a horde of witch-doctor-cursed peons has its charms, including a chatty skeleton who mans the switchboards. It might seem like an easy joke to frame the underworld’s soul train as the 1970s Soul Train, but Burton leans into the absurdity hard enough to appreciate the energy for the two times this location is visited. There also some solid mileage with the comedic backup of Willem Dafoe as a dead actor masquerading as a ghost detective and Burn Gorman as a reverend who seems to speak exclusively in scripture that confuses everybody around him.

All of Burton’s toys feel like they’ve been taken out of storage and given a good dusting. The abundance of practical effects adds to the charm of everything from the mutilated corpses of death’s waiting room to the grotesque demons that shuffle around the hallways. Stop-motion is given some love in both composited sequences with live-action and full-on animated sequences. For as much as the film relies more on licensed music than Elfman’s score, there’s some clever usage of notable tracks beyond the obligatory reprisal of Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat.” Beetlejuice’s penchant for forced karaoke sequences still has some amusement for the strange looks he gets while belting out “MacArthur Park” from mouths other than his own. There’s some bloody brilliance to how Beetlejuice still has his gross-out glory, as his first meeting with Lydia in years immediately zooms into scenes of exploding guts and violent babies that chew on flesh. It’s also hard not to love a film with some heartfelt horror nods to Mario Bava, both in style and name.

The star of Beetlejuice is the world and effects, which Burton not only realizes, but leans into with wondrous creativity. While the film isn’t adverse to regurgitating many nostalgic beats, the favoring of old-school effects or old-school line recitations makes for a better film. For as easy as it would seem to forgive the uneven script for the on-point practicalities, it’s a feature too strong to ignore or scoff. Burton’s greatest strengths are in his visual flair for the world of outsiders, an aspect that made the original Beetlejuice iconic. The sequel is aware enough of what works to let the weird wonders of the underworld run the show, where the unfortunate shrunken-head employee Bob gets his special credit, and one returning character seems to be composed entirely of puppets and clay. In the words of the film’s decayed titular character, Burton’s direction ensures that “juice is loose” rather than restrained to his greatest hits.