After a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia’s life is turned upside down when her teenage daughter, Astrid, accidentally opens the portal to the Afterlife.
Chuck says:
Stumbling out of the gate, Tim Burton’s long-awaited “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” eventually rights itself and delivers the unique brand of horrific dark humor fans of the previously film embrace. However, it’s a bit of a clumsy, overly long haul before we get to the inspired hijinks that carry the third act. Cluttered with extraneous characters and incidents, the screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar spends far too much time setting up a needlessly complicated story involving a resurrected lover out for revenge, a deceased actor with an identity crisis, multiple characters with self-esteem issues and loads of familial dysfunction.
You’ll noticed I didn’t mention psychedelic afterlife shenanigans and a famous bio-exorcist with wonderfully groan-inducing one-liners. There’s far too little of what made the 1988 feature a cult classic in the sequel’s first hour and it suffers for it. Yet, patience is finally rewarded when Burton’s uniquely macabre pieces all come together, the film’s conclusion everything fans have been craving.
Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) has found a use for her unique ability of being able to see dead people. The host of a “reality” television show dealing with haunted houses, she gotten used to seeing souls caught in limbo. However, we she begins to catch glimpses of her old nemesis Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), she knows something is amiss. And when her father dies – in spectacularly gruesome fashion – she’s forced to deal with her eccentric stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara). Insisting they return to Winter River and the creepy home they once lived in, the duo heads out with Rory (Justin Theroux), Lydia’s opportunistic television producer, and Astrid (Jenna Ortega), her resentful daughter, in tow.
Meanwhile, an accident in the afterlife has reanimated Delores (Monica Bellucci), a soul-sucking entity who was once the titular character’s wife. Seems he did her wrong – I’ll leave it to you dear viewer to discover just what occurred – and she’s out to make her ex suffer…eternally. Leaving soul-depleted corpses in her wake, paranormal detective Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe) has been assigned to see who’s killing the already-dead. Beetlejuice finds Delores is on the hunt and is suddenly on the run.
As I said, there’s a great deal going on here, too much actually. While it’s always a delight to see Bellucci and a sequence in which Delores literally staples herself back together is a highlight, her presence, as well as that of Dafoe’s Jackson, are for the most part superfluous. That their story is referred to so infrequently bares this out, and while these moments bog down the story, Dafoe’s over-the-top performance as a dead actor who’s convinced he’s actually a cop, albeit a dead one, is a hoot. (The Mario Bava-inspired flashback is a keeper as well.)
Had this storyline been excised, perhaps the rest of the film wouldn’t have seemed so ponderous. Far too many expository scenes are used early on to reestablish Lydia and Delia’s relationship as well as the divide between Astrid and her mother. These moments are done with little flair, their obligatory nature obvious, the cast and Burton simply going through the motions. Keaton is surprisingly stiff in the early going, his manic approach notably absent.
Thankfully, things right themselves once the trio of Deetz women find themselves in Beetlejuice’s domain. Burton and his production designer Mark Scruton don’t disappoint, delivering an expanded afterlife environment that takes the original film’s macabre chic aesthetic to wonderfully perverse extremes, the aptly named transport, “The Soul Train,” a highlight.
Not only do the visuals shift in the third act but the pace quickens, and Keaton finds his footing, firing off one gleefully inappropriate joke after another. A wedding scene using Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” is employed to mirror the famous “Banana Boat Song” sequence from the first movie. Though a bit long, it works, the requisite cake melting in spectacular neon fashion.
Whether this follow-up has the shelf-life of its predecessor remains to be seen. However, “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” will likely prove just good enough to satisfy the Burton disciples, his vision still a distinctive one amidst the CGI-cluttered features that litter today’s cinematic landscape.
2 1/2 Stars
