Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Review – Another Tired Legacy Sequel

Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic

There’s something about catching a movie in your formative years that can hook you for life, but there is a flip side to that coin. Sometimes, if you don’t see them at the right time, they don’t resonate with you in the same way you would if you had seen them as a kid. There are several 80s movies that I grew up on, like everyone else, but there are a handful that I missed the boat on at the time. Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice was one of them, and it did not resonate with me when I saw it as an adult.

So, I was frankly ambivalent about the legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice but went into it with an open mind.

Picking up 36 years after Beetlejuice, Lydia (Winona Ryder) is now a medium with a talk show about haunted houses and a mom who has a strained relationship with her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Along with Lydia’s producer/boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) and her stepmom Delia (Catherine O’Hara), they return to the house in Winter River to mourn a death in the family. 

Along with seeing ghosts, Lydia is beginning to be haunted again by a specific spirit, the one and only Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). Beetlejuice, in the afterworld, is trying to get Lydia’s attention more and more and receives startling news that his ex-wife, a soul-sucking witch named Delores (Monica Bellucci), is out for revenge.

Some new elements are introduced into the film. Burton has found a late-career muse in Ortega, bringing her in here after directing her on the Netflix show Wednesday. Astrid does not believe that her mom sees ghosts, mainly because she has not communicated with Astrid’s deceased father. She is given a predictable side plot involving a boy in Winter River that later ties into the overall story. 

Bellucci is an actress not known for comedy, so her presence here is a bit of a surprise. She gets a nice spotlight in the film when Beetlejuice recounts how they met, married, and died during the Black Plague, but aside from that, she feels underutilized. 

Willem Dafoe plays a dead Hollywood actor famous for detective roles. He is the detective on the case trying to find Delores. Some of the funnier moments in the film involve him blurring the lines between being a cop and an actor playing a cop. 

Frankly, though, very little new or fresh is being brought to the table. From the beginning, which recreates the opening title sequence with an aerial shot over the town of Winter River that transitions to a set, the movie is heavy on the member berries and nostalgia of the first film. 

Due to circumstances involving her daughter, Beetlejuice is still an untrustworthy trickster Lydia is forced to rely on. He is still as foul and uncouth as ever, too, which is part of the character’s appeal. Keaton brings more of the same manic energy to the character that made it such an iconic performance (in many people’s eyes) back in the 80s and helped make him a star.

Lydia’s occupation is a logical progression for the character, though her dependence on Theroux’s painfully unfunny Rory is head-scratching. She is determined to forge a relationship with her daughter and to do whatever it takes to save her when she is suddenly in peril. 

Catherine O’Hara’s Delia is much more palatable this time, though still an eccentric artist. I found the character hard to stomach in the original film. Still, this time, she elicited a few more chuckles out of me, especially her desire to honor a deceased character with a special Egyptian ceremony involving asps who allegedly had their venom drained.

Overall, though, the film felt too much like it was digging up a 36-year-old corpse to try to reanimate it for a newer generation. I was shocked by how little I laughed at the movie. The storyline felt very familiar and recycled, tossing in visual images that were callbacks to the first movie. Even a new character like Justin Theroux’s Rory is little more than a substitute for the original’s Otho. A children’s choir sings a mournful rendition of “Day-O” because, hey, that song was part of a big scene in the last movie. And the ending is essentially the first movie’s ending with a slight twist.

If you are a major fan of the original movie, or Tim Burton in general, there may be enough to give you that happy feeling of seeing some of your favorite characters reunited. I didn’t expect to love it, but I hoped perhaps it would give me a better insight into what I was missing in being so lukewarm on the original movie, but no such thing happened.

The bottom line is that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does not do enough to elevate itself beyond merely being a nostalgia act playing the hits. 

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars