Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Grade: B

I was in 1st grade when Beetlejuice (1988) came out. On the young side, for sure, but old enough to have seen it in the theater. I discussed it with a good friend in my class. Lots of “I like the part where” conversations took place. He said “Beetlejuice was mint! I like the part where the guy’s teeth fall out!” The teacher (Cheryl Nichols, God bless her, one of my favorites) came over to us and said “I like the part where you boys listen. I like that part.”

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s opening credits took me back. It’s the same font, same score (slightly updated), with a very similar overhead shot through the town, which becomes a model of the town by the end. “Nice model,” to paraphrase the man himself. You can compare it to how close Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick’s opening titles were to each other. Director Tim Burton has said that working on this movie was a refreshing, revitalizing joy. It gave him back a certain love of making films that he had lost. We can sense that. You will have a great time at Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Burton was able to retain the offbeat charm of the first movie, and has made lightning strike again.

You could even say that from a technical standpoint, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is better than the first. While I enjoyed the 1988 film slightly more than Roger Ebert, he had a point when he said the opening sequence is wonderful and charming, then the special effects team takes over, and the rest of it never rises back to the level of the promise it showed at the beginning. This sequel has something great to listen to and look at in practically every scene, and this time, the sweet narrative thread is carried all the way through.

If you’re wondering, as I was, if Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis show up for surprise uncredited cameos, I’ll go ahead and pop that balloon. They are not in this. One vague line of dialogue (“we found a loophole, and they moved on”) explains them away. The movie suffers from some of the most forced expository screenwriting I’ve heard this year. Characters spew out facts about their lives over the last 36 years – how they met someone, what they’ve been doing – to other characters who already know. It’s obvious they are just catching us up. I didn’t care too much about the overly complicated nuts and bolts of the plot; there’s some business about chants, violating clauses, loopholes, loopholes to override those loopholes, and the like. It’s beside the point. After a hard week with some tragedy, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a perfectly entertaining victory lap that provides a momentary relief from current events.

Winona Ryder is back as Lydia. She is now the host of a successful TV show about talking to ghosts. Her father Charles has just died (though I liked Jeffrey Jones’s performance in the original movie, it’s understandable why he didn’t return for this), so she and her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) have been brought back to the notorious house out in the country, to clean it out. Michael Keaton’s title character of course comes in to play, and it’s like he never left. He doesn’t appear to have aged, which makes sense. If you’re made up to look hundreds of years old in 1988, you’ll still pull it off in 2024 and beyond. The returning cast members all shine just as much, but it’s the new people I enjoyed the most – especially Justin Theroux as Lydia’s fiancée, and Willem Dafoe as an action movie star who always insisted on doing his own stunts, and, well, that’s how he ended up in the afterlife. Jenna Ortega is wonderful as Lydia’s daughter Astrid, an apple who hasn’t fallen far from the tree. A subplot involving a potential romance with a local boy could have made its own standalone movie, but it takes an unfortunate turn.

The limits of PG-13 are definitely pushed. There is one F bomb. It’s well-used, and provides one of the biggest laughs. The actors have reported that the climactic sequence in the church was a blast to film, and I had a blast watching it. They are possessed into performing an old campy song. Its inclusion may put it back on the map, much like the famous dance to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song).” Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a merry, convivial journey with no small amount of scintillation. Am I making sense here, or did that read like stereo instructions?

Grade: B