Jonah Naplan   September 6, 2024

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is enjoyable the same way a mega-milkshake is enjoyable. It’s big, it’s rich, it tastes good, and it’s PACKED with sugar and other goodies, but it’s ultimately too much to handle and your stomach hurts after you’ve finished. Tim Burton has returned to direct this legacyquel of a sort to his cult classic of a 1988 original that hit it big back in the day because it was mostly family-friendly with a PG rating but also contained a self-deprecating edge that mixed macabre humor with thematically suggestive jokes. Burton, working again with star Michael Keaton, has made what is arguably a more scattered and slapstick-heavy film, but it manages to find intrinsic charm within that personality and the tone is playful, irreverent, and so much more vulgar. To that point, the filmmakers seem to find out the hard way that “more” is often the enemy of “good,” and they set up too many side plots that they don’t know how to resolve effectively, and the film ends up a chaotic amalgam of seemingly every little, teeny tiny idea that was ever proposed for this project. And yet, I was consistently entertained from beginning to end. Call me loony, I guess.

Thirty-six years after the events of the original, a middle-aged Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), who didn’t get along with her parents when she was once a teen, is now in turmoil with her own teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who’s basically a mini-her. Lydia’s mother-in-law Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) is still pursuing a career in sculpting, opening up peculiar exhibitions to display her pieces (she also donated the art center that sits right next to Astrid’s school). Lydia’s got a boyfriend named Rory (Justin Theroux), who directs her paranormal TV series “Ghost House with Lydia Deetz,” and his opening minutes make it obvious to the viewer where his character will be going. Beetlejuice himself also has a date with a significant other, the resurrected Delores (Monica Bellucci) who’s introduced to us in an early scene that has her reconstructing her mangled body by stapling her limbs to her torso and her fingers to her hands and who vows to take revenge on The Juice after he abandoned her centuries earlier.

The plot, to the extent that it can be called a “plot,” is struck into motion when the beloved Charles Deetz (played by Jeffrey Jones in the original “Beetlejuice,” but who doesn’t make a physical appearance in this movie for obvious reasons) dies an untimely death as portrayed by a hilarious claymation sequence (the first of many subversive sidetracks). A heartbroken Delia returns to their family manor on the hill to pack up the house and sell it, which, of course, is where Beetlejuice enters the picture. The famous demon has been living in the Winter River miniature model right where we left him, and he’s further expanded his kooky empire that has zero object for logic, physics, or the limitations of the human body.

More on the body horror: I would have personally rated “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” R for bloody violence, but I can still see why the MPAA would have considered it all just cartoonish enough to choose not to cross that line. Burton gets super gross and rancid here, playing with the audience’s senses to make us think he’s going down a certain path and then whipping out something totally different from the far left field. It’s completely juvenile and childish even if the content is anything but “for kids.” Is the extremity necessary? I’d venture that it surely is not, but it’s become what we now expect from a “Beetlejuice” movie and the experience is all the more charming for it (even the “Beetlejuice” Broadway musical is joyfully macabre along the same lines). Characters are melted, dismembered, shrunken, stabbed, and die painful, gruesome deaths in the name of creating a turgid spectacle that likes to test the waters and experiment with what it can get away with.

The performances are mostly excellent, including Keaton who spends much of the movie behaving as if he’s in a different decade when films valued one really strong lead star to anchor the entire picture. He’s in this movie quite a bit more than he was in the original “Beetlejuice,” and Keaton ravishes around in the role as if it’s been stirring inside him for years and now he’s finally getting another chance to bring it out. But everybody else is similarly respectable in roles that highlight all their talents and idiosyncrasies. Ryder is great at finding the nuances within her character that feel poignant and of a natural progression from where we last left off with her. O’Hara plays to the same spectrum, infusing Delia Deetz with a touch of melancholy as a side dish to the main course of self-humiliation and both verbal and physical pratfalls (she’s essentially Moira Rose of “Schitt’s Creek” in a new wrapper).

Other side performances function as something completely different than “just characters.” Monica Bellucci, for one thing, is not merely a narrative cog, but a thematic one; all the movie’s blood and gore is often the work of her own hand; while Willem Dafoe as an undead once-action-star-turned-detective-wannabe named Wolf Jackson who visually reminded me of his role in “Poor Things,” but who characteristically reminded me of Norman Osborn from Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man,” bumbles around like one of those retired superheroes who miss the “good old days” of stardom. But the real subject of conversation here will regard a character named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a love interest of Astrid’s who may or may not be trouble, but whose plotline ends up going nowhere and feels wasted among this chaos.

The biggest glaring struggle of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is that it’s trying to cram in too much with so little time. Most of its storylines ultimately don’t lead anywhere and we’re left wondering what their purpose was in the first place. The fact that there’s about four different movies going on here only illustrates why the film is so scattershot and unfocused in nature. The screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar seems to be overly enthusiastic about the interplay between characters as they enter and exit relationships. All of the movie’s principal subjects are either in, running from, or pursuing one, and it’s a central idea that shouldn’t fully work in this type of project which explains why it doesn’t. The ultimate consequence is that there’s less time for the stuff that really hits; the odd character choices, the bizarre atmosphere, the underlying kookiness. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is a peculiar movie, but it does itself a disservice by never committing to the bit as much as we’d like and showing it.

Still, for all its narrative stuffiness that could just be the plain result of the filmmakers’ excitement to finally put this IP in the public eye again, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is oodles of fun, and diehard fans of the original are sure to eat up every minute. And what’s more? There’s lots of talk nowadays about how the modern legacyquel seems to constantly spite itself by employing fan service for a cheap applause or tender tear, all while setting up a new generation of characters with the potentiality of carrying the franchise on their backs from here on forward. This maxim presents its most benign face in Ortega, whose focused demeanor and hopeful mannerisms shock new life into this series. She’s the whipped cream on top of a milkshake that has overflowed and is running down the sides.

Now playing in theaters.