'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' is an Overcaffeinated Theater Kid Dance Party
Tim Burton's 36-years-overdue sequel is overflowing with ideas but develops none, ending up feeling somehow both ornate and half-assed.
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Hi. Another preamble here. Some people love when I bitch about movies I didn’t like, and other people tell me that I’m an embittered killjoy who needs to touch grass (I do, I swear). In the interests of balance, before I get to ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” I’d like to point out that the latest movie from Jeremy Saulnier (‘Blue Ruin,’ ‘Green Room’) is called ‘Rebel Ridge’ and is now available on Netflix (blegh). I’ll have more to say on the subject in the future, but for now, suffice to say, it totally slaps (yay!) and you should definitely watch it.
Okay, onto business.
In the age of IP cinema, one comes to expect a busy plot, and usually the culprit is clear: there are 147 Marvel characters owned by Disney or whatever, and the acclaimed auteur hot off a Sundance indie hired to direct the latest installment has to try to fit them all into a single, 160-minute movie. Given that prompt, it’s understandable that a beleaguered creative team might end up with an overstuffed multiverse plot even if they didn’t especially want one. With Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a franchise with only one other installment that came out 36 years ago, you wouldn’t think that would be a problem.
So in a sense it’s refreshing that it doesn’t feel like it was commercial necessities that doomed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but rather a basic lack of artistic restraint. This Beetlejuice sequel (Beetledeuce, for brevity’s sake), directed by Tim Burton and written by Alfred Gough and Seth Grahame-Smith, feels like it had 12 medium-viable ideas for a story, but rather than exploring any one of them, it just sort of smooshed them all together and tried to reconcile them with a musical montage. It evokes a screenwriter running to the set with a stack of horror movie mad libs who tripped and fell on the floor, and Burton just shot the spilled pile sequentially.
Allow me to attempt to explain just a fraction of Beetledeuce’s half-baked plots. Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the weird girl who could see dead people from the original, is all grown up now, but still with the same makeup and hairstyle, which I suppose is ostensibly justified by her having grown up to be the Elvira-esque host of a show where she talks to ghosts. Lydia’s troubles include: Rory, her overbearing, space-agey manager boyfriend, played enjoyably by Justin Theroux; Astrid (Jenny Ortega), her teenage daughter who hates her; and a recent phenomenon in which she keeps having visions of Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), the trickster demon who tried to marry her when she was a teenager. These hallucinations have her all messed up, even though her job is to converse with the dead.
Astrid, meanwhile, is a ghost-skeptical goth (a contradiction in terms?) who hates her mom because, despite being famous for channeling the dead, Lydia can’t or won’t speak to Astrid’s father, who died in a boating accident in the Amazon. Astrid is also an outcast at school on account of being a goth (“when you have two kids and a divorce I’ll be the one laughing,” she tells a group of cheerleaderish mean girls), despite attending an art-focused high school that has her family’s name on the front of the building.
That’s because her step-grandmother, Delia (the divine Catherine O’Hara, whose appeal here is softened somewhat by the character’s similarity to Moira from Schitt’s Creek) is a famous conceptual artist. Only, Delia is having trouble too, on account of her husband, Charles (Jeffrey Jones, a famous face from the 80s-90s who hasn’t worked much since he was convicted of taking nude pictures of a 14-year-old boy in the early 2000s) has just been eaten by a shark after his plane crashed in the Pacific on the way to a bird watching trip, something we learn about via claymation flashback.
I guess that’s one way to avoid putting a sex offender in the film. But if the goal was not drawing attention to his absence, mission failed (Jones’ visage certainly gets more screentime than Danny DeVito, who shows up in a cameo). Charles’ storyline also raises the question of how many characters whose backstory includes being eaten by fish is too many in a film that doesn’t explore getting eaten by fish as a theme. I feel like it’s probably two. Two characters getting eaten by fish is too many if getting eaten by fish isn’t a theme.
You’d think this would all already be enough story for one film, but no! Astrid also meets a manic hunky broccoli boy (broccoli is the haircut, I apologize if you didn’t know this) played by Arthur Conti, who turns out to have a dark secret that gets Astrid entangled in the afterlife. If I was the producer choosing Beetledeuce storylines to pursue, I probably would’ve gone with this one. It might not have been the most purely original, but at least it drew on some actual human emotions and wasn’t just a collection of artistic influences stitched together with costumes and caffeine.
Have you noticed that I’ve typed all this already and have barely even mentioned the character Beetlejuice yet??? Well he’s got problems too! It turns out he has an ex-wife, played by Monica Bellucci, who is apparently… some kind of even more evil demon than he is (?)… who has recently stapled her bodyparts back together (raising the question, never addressed, of why she was apart in the first place and what changed that allowed her to reassemble)… and who is now back… and on a rampage that involves sucking out the souls of the dead who then become more dead. Willem Dafoe plays some kind of afterlife cop hot on her tail, which is kind of fun, despite us not knowing what she actually wants (beyond Beetlejuice) and what Willem Dafoe’s character has the power to do to her once he catches her.
Beetlejuice explains all this backstory, of how he met Belucci’s character during the Black Plague while working as a graverobber, via a black-and-white flashback narrated in Italian, delivered as a story to Beetlejuice’s office drones, who are all shrunken headed guys in suits. That part was kind of fun, even if knowing all the details of Beetlejuice’s origin story weakens his appeal in some ways and raises more questions than it answers.