Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on massive television.
When a sequel comes out a really long time after the original movie, it feels like a crap shoot. Sometimes, you get something like Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie for the ages. Sometimes you get Psycho II, which is far better than it deserves to be. And sometimes, you get Coming 2 America, which should never have been greenlit. So I went into Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, coming 36 years after the original film, with hope, but with my expectations guarded.
It's also worth noting that we have upgraded our downstairs television. It’s hard to say no to a giant-ass screen when the price drops on it so much that it costs about half of a car payment. I was planning on christening the TV with something like the new Frankenstein film, but this was more my wife’s speed, and so we went with this instead.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn’t going to pretend that it’s not three and a half decades after the first movie. Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) now hosts a ghost-based television show where she investigates ghost sightings and hauntings. Her step-mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) is still an artist, now much more of the performance variety. As the film starts, Lydia is filming a show and believes that she has seen Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), the bio-exorcist who attempted to marry her in the first movie, in the audience. She gets an emergency call from her mother to discover that her father has died in a plane crash, but was actually killed by a shark once the plane was in the water.
We’re also going to be introduced to Astrid (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s daughter, who is currently at a private school and has almost no relationship with her mother. Much of this is because Astrid is convinced that Lydia’s work is a scam and that she’s not actually seeing any ghosts.
Anyway, the family reconvenes at the house they lived in for the first movie to hold a funeral for dear departed Charles, bitten in half by a shark. Here’s the thing—you know there’s going to be some trouble, but what I’ve discussed up to this point is a very small percentage of the plot. So while all of this is going on in the living world, in the world of the dead, a corpse that has been dismembered is awakened and puts herself back together. Delores (Monica Bellucci) has a connection to Beetlejuice, who is now running some sort of afterlife call center staffed entirely by a group of shrunken headed guys—essentially a posse of fan favorite shrunken head dude from the waiting room in the first movie. Delores is coming after him, and also sees the return of Lydia and Delia as a way to get back with Lydia.
But wait, there’s more. In the afterworld, the appearance of Delores brings forth the undead version of the police, headed by action movie star/live grenade victim Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe). Astrid meets local boy Jeremy (Arthur Conti), and a minor romance seems to bloom. Oh, and Lydia is involved with her producer Rory (Justin Theroux). The two met at a retreat for people who were grieving—Astrid’s father Richard (Santiago Cabrera) has been dead for years—he disappeared in the Amazon and his body was never found.
All of this is the problem with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; there’s a lot of plot going on here. Everything that I’ve talked about here needs to be resolved by the end of the film, and this is not a mini-series or a four-hour movie. What this means is that some of the plot threads here get tied up a good 40 minutes before the film ends, and do so without any fanfare—they simply get handled, and it’s on to the next plot point. The last 15 minutes or so come close to giving whiplash.
There are some fan service parts of this. There’s a call-back to the Banana Boat song, as well as a new choreographed musical number at the end of the film (I predict if there’s a Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in the future, they’ll do something with In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida). We have to make sure that we’re hitting the afterlife in scenes, that we get a family reunion, that we have a wedding sequence, that the Astrid/Jeremy story is dealt with, that the Lydia/Rory story is dealt with, that the Delores/Beetlejuice story is dealt with, etc. There’s enough plot here for two or three movies.
I’m not going to lie—it’s fun to see these characters again. Catherine O’Hara is great in everything, and I like the resurgence of the career of Winona Ryder. Michael Keaton is clearly having a great time as Beetlejuice, and while he has had a number of memorable roles, few (aside from Batman) are as iconic or associated with him as this one. That said, this Beetlejuice is less manic, less unhinged, as if he's been a bit tamed by his afterlife. Danny DeVito is in this for a cup of coffee, and Burn Gorman shows up as the local priest as well. M
I do need to mention something, though, and it is a minor spoiler. If you don’t want a spoiler, skip to the last paragraph.
One of the conventions established in the first film is that everyone who works in civil service in the afterlife is a suicide. The caseworker for the Maitlands in the first film, the woman behind the desk in the waiting room, etc. are all clearly suicides. In this film, we discover Richard, Lydia’s late husband and Astrid’s father, working in a civil servant-type job. I get why this happens—Burton needed a way for Astrid to find her dad. But Burton either forgot that detail from the first film or Richard has killed himself by being attacked by piranha. So this is either sloppy or much darker than we might have expected.
The truth is that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is fine. The first movie is a cultural touchstone and a classic for a lot of reasons, and the sequel, especially one coming this much later, had a very uphill battle to fight. The issue is that there’s too much here. This is two movies worth of plot elements shoehorned into a 105-minute run time. It feels plot-heavy and a lot of plot elements are not resolved in satisfying ways. Still, at least it wasn’t Coming 2 America.
Why to watch Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: A lot of the magic is still here. Why not to watch: There are far too many plots going on here.
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