Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
Another popular '80s film gets a
long-awaited sequel with Tim Burton's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The end
result is weird enough that it might gain a cult following, but it has a lot
more flaws than its predecessor.
Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), who was a
teenager in the original 1988 Beetlejuice, is the host of a talk show
centered on the paranormal. She has a teen daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who
barely speaks to her, and a sleazy manager Rory (Justin Theroux), who has
romantic designs on her. When she receives news that her father Charles died,
she returns to her childhood home. Inside the home is the model of the town
that contains the trickster ghost Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). Beetlejuice
still hopes to marry Lydia, but he has problems of his own and he is being
pursued in the afterlife by his murderous ex-wife Dolores (Monica Bellucci).
One of the strengths of Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice is Burton clearly favors a tactile approach to his sets and
effects. The sets, the makeup, the gore—it all feels real and handmade, and
there's a definite charm to that.
The big problem with Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice is the story is a complete mess, structurally. There're too
many plot lines. The original had a simple but effective structure. Here, the
movie has a hard time deciding what story it's telling. There's the Lydia/Rory
subplot, there's Astrid's relationship with a boy in town, there's the
Beetlejuice/Dolores subplot (and Dolores disappears for long stretches of the
film), there's a subplot about Lydia's stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara)
trying to create an art installation to process her grief, there's the
Lydia/Astrid relationship, and there's an afterlife cop (played amusing by Willem
Dafoe). The threads don't mesh together. It's a 104-minute film, but Lydia and
Beetlejuice don't cross paths until about an hour in, and the film suffers for
it.
The tone and content are also uglier in
the new installment. There was a dark, morbid streak to the original but it had
a sweetness to it that the sequel lacks. Parents should also be aware the
original was PG-rated and the new installment is a PG-13, and it's a PG-13 that
could have easily been an R with some fairly hardcore (if cartoonish) gore. If
you have fond memories of seeing the original in theaters as a kid and want to
recreate that experience with a young child, you might want to watch that movie
first.
