Tim Burton is not a filmmaker. You can be forgiven for the confusion that previous sentence created, but let me explain. Tim Burton isn’t someone interested in making movies in the traditional sense. Instead, he’s an artist. He’s more focused on eliciting an emotional response as opposed to telling a story, and he uses the trappings and equipment of cinema to craft his art. In his way, Burton is similar to Andy Warhol. Both men had passionate defenders and equally passionate attackers. Both men were driven by particular artistic inclinations. Both men did it their way.

Good for Burton. He is a genuine auteur, and that’s probably why I’ve bounced off a chunk of his films. Allow me to explain that I don’t hate his entire filmography. Batman is mostly good. Batman Returns is really good. Mars Attacks never fails to make me chortle, and both Sleepy Hollow and Ed Wood are genuine masterpieces. However, his reboot of Planet of the Apes is terrible. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is not good. Alice in Wonderland straight up sucks.

Burton is resolutely committed to making his films his way, and to quote a certain extremely elderly president, God love him. When I heard Burton was making a sequel to his 1988 hit Beetlejuice, I was torn. Would we get the Burton who used his aesthetic in service of story, the one who made Big Fish? Or would we get the Burton who inflicted Dark Shadows upon an unsuspecting populace? It turns out that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is more of the latter with occasional flashes of the former.

We’re reintroduced to one Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder). Before, she was a snide goth teen with a keen intellect. Now, she’s a somewhat gullible goth adult who hosts the supernatural reality show “Ghost House.” Why am I accusing Lydia of being gullible? That’s due to Rory (Justin Theroux), who is Lydia’s beau, producer, and quasi-manager. The Lydia of 1988 would have seen right through Rory’s clownish gaslighting, whereas the Lydia of 2024 is…kind of cool with it?

Though you can’t blame Lydia entirely, since she is under quite a lot of stress. Part of the problem is that she’s been seeing things. A specific thing, actually. Her family was haunted by the bio-exorcist and chaos imp Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) thirty-six years ago, and lately she’s been seeing him pop up more and more frequently. 

There’s also the fact that Lydia has a fraught relationship with her teen daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega). While Lydia was once a snide goth, Astrid is a snide disbeliever in the supernatural. Astrid thinks her mother is a hack, and she blames her mother for the disappearance of her father in the Amazon. Any truth to that? Nope! It’s just manufactured conflict for a mother and daughter to deal with in a modern day blockbuster.

Anyway, Lydia learns of the tragic death of her father Charles (definitely not Jeffrey Jones*). That causes a number of things to happen, including:

• Lydia comes back into contact with her mother, daffy avante-garde artist Delia (Catherine O’Hara).
• Lydia is pressured into marriage by Rory.
• The re-emergence of one Betelgeuse.
• The re-emergence of one Delores (Monica Bellucci), who is both Betelgeuse’s ex-wife and an undead fiendish thingy.
• Astrid’s discovery of Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a cute teenage boy with A Secret.
• The introduction of Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), a formerly alive action star who’s become a ghost detective.

Again, I have a lot of respect for Tim Burton as an artist. However, it feels like he’s frequently more interested in creating imagery through practical effects, CGI and production design, and only then cramming a narrative around all of that. That’s been Burton’s move for decades, and with this film, at least he’s being consistent. It’s not so much that the sequel is of a piece as the original, it’s that Burton just made more of the original. So we have more scenes of the afterlife bureaucracy, more cartoonish gore, more Betelgeuse hijinks. I get why this film has been a box office hit, because it’s giving audiences exactly what they want in a sequel, and very little surprising on top of that. However! There are moments when Burton moves away from what he did in the prior film that are kind of brilliant. For example, a sequence where we see how Betelgeuse and Dolores met is shot like an Italian horror movie, and Burton commits to the bit so hard he makes it hilarious. 

The original Beetlejuice has a barely-there plot that exists to string along gags. The screenplay for the sequel, written by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith has the opposite problem. There are several plots and subplots that occasionally intersect, often just stop, and never work together in harmony. That plot knot also screws up the pacing of the film. Scenes frequently either go on too long or too short, and if you’re making a comedy and your timing is all futzed up, that’s bad. On top of that are a couple of unfortunate character decisions. First, the decision to make the adult Lydia a gullible ding-dong is not great. That means her character is less interesting, and often has less agency. Along similar lines was the blindingly obvious move to make Astrid a skeptic of the supernatural. That was a bad move because we in the audience know that the supernatural is real in this world, yet a major character disbelieves it for at least half of the film. That choice wastes valuable narrative real estate that could have been used for more compelling conflict or more interesting character beats.**

If there’s any saving grace, it’s in the performances. Catherine O’Hara proves why she’s one of the great comedians as the wackadoo artist/influencer Delia. Whether she’s creating mad art pieces or putting down everyone around her, O’Hara shines. Despite the somewhat questionable character she’s called upon to play, Winona Ryder remains an absolute professional. Her Lydia still has her dark spark, it’s just been hidden away for many years. She gets the chance to be more lively when she’s briefly paired up with Keaton. Speaking of which, Keaton effortlessly slips back into the fright wig and zoot suit. He’s clearly having a blast*** with the role, and perhaps the smartest decision he and Burton made is the idea that Betelgeuse has never had, nor will ever have, anything approaching a character arc. He’s like a perverse Bugs Bunny with a mean streak. Keaton doesn’t have too much screen time, but when he does show up, he grabs focus and never lets go.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is one of those movies that’s essentially critic proof. If you liked the original, I reckon you’ll still probably have a pretty good time with this one. It’s your typical sequel that’s bigger, louder, and dumber than the original, but once in a while, it does something unexpected and wild.

*I was fascinated by how Burton handled the character of Charles, originally played by the mega-disgraced Jeffrey Jones. It’s as if he had to deal with a character played by a canceled actor, but he didn’t want to completely erase the role played by one of his frequent collaborators. He could have dealt with it the same way he handled the characters played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin, which is to have a character toss off a single line explaining their absence.

**It’s as if a major character in Batman thought that Batman was an urban legend until the last ten minutes of the film. 

***It’s very funny to me how little Keaton cares about having played Batman, and how much he adores playing Betelgeuse. He’ll play a brooding creature of the night for a nice check, but he’ll play a rancid pervert for free.

Tim Brennan Movie Critic

Tim has been alarmingly enthusiastic about movies ever since childhood. He grew up in Boulder and, foolishly, left Colorado to study Communications in Washington State. Making matters worse, he moved to Connecticut after meeting his too-good-for-him wife. Drawn by the Rockies and a mild climate, he triumphantly returned and settled down back in Boulder County. He's written numerous screenplays, loves hiking, and embarrassed himself in front of Samuel L. Jackson. True story.