'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' film review: Betelgeuse should have stayed dead
Death is supposed to be eternal. Sadly 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' (opening in theaters on Sept. 6) exhumed a series that should have remained dead.
In short: Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) returns to torment Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) after tragedy befalls the Deetz family. Jenna Ortega, Catherine O'Hara, Willem Dafoe and Monica Bellucci also star.
Quite honestly 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' takes entirely too long to come to life. Almost a full hour passes before the plot finally takes shape and the plot finally lays out what is at stake for Lydia Deetz. Leading up to this point, 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' wastes so much time catching up with old characters and establishing all the groundwork for so many plot threads involving so many various characters.
In the first film Betelgeuse quickly rereferred to his first wife - and this time around the sequel finally introduces his spurned ex-wife (malevolently played by Bellucci). Willem Dafoe plays some dead actor acting as a detective in the Afterlife hunting Betelgeuse's ex-wife. In the years since the first film, Lydia has become the host of a ghost-themed TV show - and she's romantically involved with her douchey fame-obsessed manager boyfriend. Delia Deetz mourns her own loss. And Lydia struggles to repair her relationship with her estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), a skeptical young woman who doesn't believe in ghosts or her mom's ability to communicate with the dead.
Simply put: 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' has far too many moving parts for the story to even being to tackle or deal with. The script is crammed with too many disparate plots and director Tim Burton is too impressed with his own past work to craft a sequel remotely as creative as the original. The number of self-indulgent callbacks to the original film borders on embarrassing. Too many plot points are cribbed from the original, which itself was an innovative gothic dark comedy.
Winona Ryder seamlessly steps back into Lydia Deetz's gothic boots all these decades later. And Michael Keaton proves he is the one and only definitive Betelgeuse. Casting 'Wednesday' star Jenna Ortega in a 'Beetlejuice' flick makes sense as Ortega has the market cornered on brooding teen angst in the mid 2020s. Tim Burton probably should have handed off this film to a new visionary - one brave enough to build upon the original film's inherent bizarreness - but Burton proves his best days are behind him with his retread of some of his best work.
Final verdict: 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' is merely the shadow of its undeniably imaginative predecessor.
Score: 2/5
'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' opens in theaters Sept. 6. The dark fantasy comedy has a runtime of 104 minutes and is rated PG-13 for violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use.
