Michael Keaton Still Has the Juice

It took 36 years to conjure a Beetlejuice sequel into existence, and you can feel every one of the countless script drafts written in the intervening decades in the finished film’s plot, which is overloaded with superfluous characters and needless subplots. The movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, is credited to just three writers (Aflred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith), but many others contributed to its development, all of whom struggled for decades to find a plausible and satisfying reason to reunite Michael Keaton’s undead trickster with Winona Ryder’s spiritual medium and goth icon.

The first film certainly did not demand a sequel. But Keaton’s Beetlejuice and the movie’s vision of the afterlife — which looks like an extremely imaginative haunted house at a grungy traveling carnival — remain etched in fans’ minds after all this time. The pull of those elements were enough to get Beetlejuice Beetlejuice made despite the obvious script difficulties. And even with a clumsy story, those two key elements — Keaton and the realm of the “Recently Deceased” — work just as well in 2024 as they did in 1988. Keaton still has the juice (and the Juice) to power this long-awaited, deeply uneven sequel.

As in the first film, Keaton is less of the star than the instigator of chaos. The story centers instead on the Deetz family, primarily Ryder’s Lydia and her eccentric stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara). The sequel opens with Lydia on the verge of marrying her manager, Rory (Justin Theroux) an oily Svengali type who exploits Lydia’s ability to see and communicate with ghosts by pushing her to host a TV show about haunted houses.

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Lydia is uncomfortable with celebrity, and equally uncertain about a union with Rory. For one thing, a second marriage won’t help her relationship with her sullen teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who doesn’t believe in ghosts or in Lydia’s gifts. (Astrid’s father, Lydia’s first husband, died before the events of the sequel.) For another thing, Lydia keeps seeing flashes of her old nemesis Beetlejuice (Keaton), who was the first (undead) guy to try to bully her into marrying him when she, Delia, and Lydia’s dad Charles first moved into their spooky country home some 30 years prior.

Then Charles dies — rather than explain why, I’ll just let you Google the actor who played him in Beetlejuice, Jeffrey Jones. That sets off a slew of additional storylines. They include: Delia trying to honor Charles’ memory with a funeral worthy of his greatness (and her oversized ego), Rory pressuring Lydia into a quickie marriage days after Charles’ wake, Astrid falling for a local boy (Arthur Conti) she discovers reading Dostoyevsky in a treehouse, and a schlocky actor turned afterlife cop (Willem Dafoe) investigating a series of murders tied to Beetlejuice’s heretofore unmentioned ex-wife (Monica Bellucci), a literal soul-sucker hellbent on revenge against her bio-exorcist hubby.

What do all these plots have to do with one another? Oddly, not very much. Several of them could be removed from the film entirely with no negative impact on the overall film — except perhaps for the fact that they would cut back on Keaton’s number of scenes, and he is the clear standout among the cast. While all the actors look happy to be quirking it up in director Tim Burton’s intricately designed underworld, most of them get very little material to work with. Bellucci and Dafoe both vanish for such long chunks of time that when they finally came back I was taken completely by surprise: I had forgotten they were in the movie in the first place.

All these extraneous narrative detours and actors just serve to distract from the successful parts of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — namely the relationship between Lydia and Astra (which is itself a clever, karmic repetition of the fractious bond between Lydia and Delia in the original Beetlejuice), and the curious connection they both share with Beetlejuice himself.

While Keaton is certainly older than he was in the first film, with his makeup, wig, and that gravely voice, he looks and sounds basically the same. Aand he still brings the same frenetic, live wire energy to Beetlejuice’s sequences. He’s funny, he’s strange, he’s scary; he’s one of the great movie characters of the ’80s, and it’s great to see him again.

Where so many of Tim Burton’s heroes are isolated, solitary outsiders, Beetlejuice seems to represent the filmmaker’s unrestrained id; the misfit who lashes out at the people instead of hiding away. (Or if he hides away, it’s because someone said his name aloud three times and banished him a giant model in the attic of an old house.) Beetlejuice’s bizarre mythology of ghosts and monsters don’t make a whole lot of sense — and it’s arguably even more confusing in the sequel — but thanks to Burton and his ghoulish imagination, it’s always fun exploring this place, with its nightmarish bureaucracy and hideous denizens caked in macabre prosthetics. (In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice I especially like the magician trapped inside one of his tricks.)

The production design by Mark Scruton, with costumes by Colleen Atwood, is jammed with weird creatures, creepy creations, and pitch-black jokes. (Just wait until you see how souls make their way from their initial purgatory to “The Great Beyond.”) The eye candy is sweet enough to help you overlook the fact that the early scenes over-explain the plot (did Beetlejuice really need an origin story?) while many later ones leave important questions totally unanswered. (The offhanded way the film dispatches the Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis characters from the original Beetlejuice honestly made me a little angry.)

It takes way too long — nearly an hour of a 105-minute movie — for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s actual story to emerge and for Keaton to take center stage again. Once he shows up, though, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice springs to life. Er, make that afterlife.

Additional Thoughts:

-The pointless characters don’t just soak up time; they leave little room for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to explore any new ideas. There’s a funny gag where one character tries to convince Lydia that Beetlejuice is a fantasy she invented — “a construct of your unpacked trauma,” they tell her. And for a moment, it feels like this movie might actually have something to say not only about that subject, but about how seemingly every horror movie of the last 15 years is, at its core, a tale about unpacked trauma. But there’s no time for that in a movie with two villains and eight wacky sidekick characters.

-Between this movie and Dune: Part Two, sandworms are having a moment.

RATING: 6/10