directed by Tim Burton
written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar
As I write this, this film is now available on every single form of home video, including digital release and physical media like Blu Ray, 4K and DVD. And yet...I actually watched this film in theaters.
One could say that a very busy schedule kept me from reviewing this film as soon as I saw it, but that would be a lie. The truth is that I spent all that time from September up until right now, grappling with my disappointment over how this movie turned out.
To give a little bit of context: the original 1988 film Beetlejuice is one of my all-time favorite movies. I watched it as a child with my aunt and little sister and enjoyed it immensely. Years later, I introduced it to my children on DVD, and one of them in particular, of the goth girl persuasion, took to it with nearly the same enthusiasm that I did. While talks about the sequel had been going on and off again for years, when it became clear that one was on its way, it was more than a movie that my daughter and I were looking forward to: it was a generational experience. So to say that my daughter and I were disappointed would be an extreme understatement.
So, decades after the first film ended, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is eking out a living as a medium with her own reality show, where she is managed by her beau Rory (Justin Theroux) but is unfortunately estranged from her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Ironically, her most cordial relationship in her life is with her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) who approaches her with unfortunate news: her father Charles has died. As a result, in deference to his last wishes, Delia, Lydia and Astrid head back to Winter River, Connecticut, where they moved during the events of the first film, and head back to their old home, only for Lydia to discover that someone else from her past is still gunning for her, none other than the spurned bio-exorcist Betelgueuse (Michael Keaton), who's facing problems of his own in the afterlife, apparently his ex-wife Delores (Monica Belluicci) has broken free of the random packages in which she was stored for some reason, and resumes her quest to murder Betelgeuse that she was unable to fulfil because he had killed her first. His only hope is apparently to marry Lydia or something like that. In the meantime, in Winter River, Astrid finds herself attracted to boy who isn't quite what he seems. Hijinks ensue.
If the synopsis sounds cluttered, rest assured that's because the plot it's summarizing is. The original movie, in contrast, had a very similar premise: a young couple, played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis (who are dismissed from this film with a single line of dialogue) die and find themselves trapped in their house. a living family moves in and makes their lives hell, and so they turn to a "bio-exorcist" named Betelguese to rid them of their problem. Hijinks ensue. Pretty simple, right?
The problem with this movie was that the filmmakers seemed torn between wanting to mine the nostalgia from the first film (look at all the guys with shrunken heads, just like the guy in the first movie!) and wanting to cash in on the popularity of Tim Burton's recent Netflix series Wednesday (let's have Jenna play a rebel again, who falls for the wrong guy...again). The end result is a middling, muddled film at best, and at worst a bastardization of one of Tim Burton's most original, quirkiest works. It wasn't all bad, of course; Michael Keaton kills it as the "ghost with the most" while Willem Dafoe entertains as an actor who, for reasons that are never explained, has become a detective in the afterlife.
I've seen worse movies, but none of those were the long-awaited sequel to one of my favorite films ever, so this one was hard to endure.
6/10
