Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

It’s starting to feel like the 1980’s again, as the decade of excess is popping up on movie screens everywhere you look. After the success of Maverick and the nostalgia Kool-Aid we all love to drink, names like Axel and Beetlejuice are back in our lives once again. The problem is, not everything ages well, and a lot can go wrong with dusting off a popular movie and bringing its characters back from the dead. For this resurrection, some things work, but when the credits started to roll, the first question that popped into my head was, who did they make this movie for?

Time, for the most part, has been good to the Deetz family. Lydia (Winona Ryder) has turned her “I see dead people” routine into a popular TV series, where her partner Rory (Justin Theroux), who is also her manager, tries to milk everything she has out of it. Things take a turn when Lydia’s father dies in a plane crash, sparking a reunion with her mother-in-law Delia (Catherine O’Hara) as they plan his final resting place. After hearing the news, the first person Lydia thinks of is her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who is not a big fan of her mom and what she calls her “act” of talking to the dead. The bridge between mother and daughter is temporarily fixed as they all travel back to Winter River to lay Lydia’s father to rest. That town, though, has a lot of memories, and it doesn’t take long for those memories to show their face in the form of Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), as he tries once again to get back to the world of the living. Things get a little tricky, and it seems Lydia needs Beetlejuice’s help, but you know what they say: never trust a bio-exorcist who hates the living, and will possess himself if he’s gotta.

The screenplay, written by Alfred Gough and Miles Miller, is quite busy, adding what seems like an endless amount of subplots. Many of which soon form a knot, which director Tim Burton never seems to be able to untangle before the movie’s conclusion. In the original, Beetlejuice would be used sparingly, only popping up before playing a bigger role in the finale. In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the juice is loose, as he is kept in view throughout the entire film, which does help, as Keaton kills it. Ultimately, more Keaton is not enough to make this juice go down easy, because for me, when it was all over, it just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice never seems to know what it wants to be, and it really tries to pack too much into its less-than-two-hour runtime. Characters are introduced, but their stories don’t really go anywhere—none more so than Monica Bellucci’s character, Dolores, who, after a fantastic intro, is given practically nothing to do. The same can be said for Ortega, but luckily for us, Keaton and O’Hara have brought their “A” game and keep us entertained. That, though, is not enough to capture the magic of the original, as it lacks the tight pacing that the first film had, often letting gags go on too long where to the point where they are not as funny. When you add the uneven script, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice never finds a rhythm, and by the time it reaches the end, it has lost all its steam. I really wanted this to work, and while I am glad I got to see Keaton put the suit on once again, it’s just too bad Burton doesn’t fit into his old clothes the same way.