Film Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

 

Sexuality/Nudity Mature

Violence Mature

Vulgarity Mature

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Mature

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a good movie once it gets going.  The problem is that it takes about an hour for it to get going.

The movie takes place several decades after the original.  Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) hosts a paranormal tv show and is engaged to her smarmy producer Rory (Justin Theroux).  She is haunted by visions of ghosts, particularly of Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton).  But then her step-mother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) lets her know that her father died.  So they get Lydia's estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and brings them back to the town from the original movie to have the funeral.  Astrid thinks her mother's supernatural desire is a fraud and she yearns to get away.  She finds a bit of reprieve with a local boy, Jeremy (Arthur Conti).  Meanwhile in the afterlife, a soul-sucking ghost named Delores (Monica Belluci) is on a hunt for Beetlejuice, who is also under the scrutiny of a ghost cop Wolf Jackson (Willem DaFoe), who was an actor in his former life.  Eventually all of these stories converge when Lydia reaches out the Beetlejuice again in desperation.

If that plot sounds a bit convoluted, it is.  It feels like the writers came up with three different scripts and couldn't decide which one to use, so they smashed them together.  As a result, the various storylines don't gell together the way that feels organic.  A number of the supporting characters get way too much screen time.  I understand why they spend so much time on Delia, because the filmmakers think that she would be good comic relief.  The problem is that she comes off more annoying than funny.  Beetlejuice Beetlejuice forgets that in the original, Delia was more of an antagonist and we don't really have a transfer of good will to her.  This is where we really miss the Maitlins (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), who were the stand in for the normal audience thrust into a weird world.  But in the sequel there are no normies.  Rory is also deeply unfunny.  He reminds me of Otho from the original, but Otho had way less screen time.

Because of the time spent on characters like this, other characters get less development.  Delores is very interesting, but she does very, very little in the movie.  Most of her scenes involve her entering into a room, asking for Beetlejuice, and then killing a ghost.  On top of this, most of her scenes don't actually move the story forward.  They serve only to remind us that she is there as a looming threat.  The same is true of Jeremy.  With a little more breathing room, his story would have a much bigger impact.  But instead it all feels rushed.

Ironically, the first half feels rushed, but it also drags.  That's because these each of the individual stories are truncated so that they can all be pushed together.  And if this was what the entire movie was, then it would not work at all.

But Michael Keaton saves this movie.

Every scene with him pops off the screen.  He ha not lost a beat when it comes to playing this character.  It feels like he just played him a few years, not a few decades ago.  He still has the mad twinkle in his eye of a complete and irredeemable louse who enjoys the chaos he creates.  He would be completely hateful except for the fact that has crazy charisma and makes you laugh constantly.  And the humor is wonderfully inappropriate.  One of the reason we like Beetlejuice is that he is the rebel who sticks it to the stuffed shirts who make things unbearably boring.  The problem with him is that he is a force of nature that cannot be tamed.

Ryder plays Lydia much differently than she did in the original.  She is much more neurotic and nervous.  But this works because Astrid is the cynical and sardonic voice that Lydia was in the first.  But Ortega is not merely mimicking Ryder in the first movie, nor is she rehashing her title character from the Netflix show Wednesday.  Her Astrid is actually very idealistic and emotional, but she hides it behind a wall of coolness.  Some of her best moments are when Jeremy says something that really touches her and she cannot help but let a genuine smile of delight break through.

Visually, the movie is wonderfully quirky.  You have Tim Burton's specific other-worldly aesthetic that combines the macabre, the weird, and the mundane.  The afterlife is both a stifling bureaucracy and a funky nightmare.  Burton is able to balance both of those very well.  There are even a few more new flourishes.  There is a fantastic black and white sequence and another claymation scene that fits right in with the overall look of the movie.  Every time Beetlejuice is on screen, they are able to squeeze out the maximum amount of humor that the movie can give.  I have to admit I laughed out load in the theater more than I thought I would.

Unfortunately, Burton's disdain for Christianity is clear once again.  He isn't openly hostile the way you find in other of his movies like Sleepy Hollow and Edward Scissorhands.  But there is a prominent supporting character that is a priest and Burton made sure to make him as creepy as possible, lacking any kind of compassion or charm.  This, along with its generally dour view of life-after-death, is slightly depressing.

Can I recommend Beetlejuice Beetlejuice?  I think that there is enough fun in this movie to make it worht watching.  But be prepared to slog through long patches of time until the scenes where the 'Juice is loose.