Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: Tim Burton’s unwieldy sequel is messy, messy entertainment
Arriving 36 years on from the original, this chaotic Beetlejuice resurrection works best as a series of funny skits – especially when they feature Catherine O’Hara.
- Reviewed from the 2024 Venice International Film Festival
According to Tim Burton’s film Beetlejuice (1988) you have to say the name ‘Beetlejuice’ three times if you want to summon him, which means the sequel, which just opened the Venice Film Festival, seems to one ‘Beetlejuice’ short. Many years after the events of the first film, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) has a TV show, exploiting her paranormal abilities under the tutelage of her boyfriend Rory, played by Justin Theroux with a distractingly stubby ponytail.
When her father Charles dies, Lydia must reunite with her estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and her stepmother, performance artist Delia (Catherine O’Hara), and return to their old house in the town of Winter River for Charles’ funeral.
The impact of the original film was twofold: Burton’s own elevation into an A-list director and the promotion of a gothy Dutch-angled aesthetic which Burton would revisit in many of his films, artwork and animation. But returning to the beginning after his bruising, prolonged relationship with Disney – some anti-Disney jokes boing out of the film like a cartoon boxing glove on a spring – isn’t quite the thrilling liberating experience audiences might be hoping for.
The effects are inventive and mostly practical, but there’s messiness where there should be anarchy and the humour at times feels forced. Guest stars Danny DeVito and Willem Dafoe do their best, but the baffling number of subplots doesn’t help as we wander around the haunted funhouse of the underworld. It’s like a talented set designer has been left to direct the film. Monica Bellucci appears as Beetlejuice’s ex-wife Dolores who is out to steal his soul, and Ortega’s Astrid has a doomed romance with a Dostoyevsky-reading teenager. Early on, we see Dolores stapling her body parts together, which could easily be a wry comment on the multiple drafts of the film that appeared in the early 1990s, when it was known under the title ‘Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian’.
Overall, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice works best as a series of skits. There’s a particularly wild rendition of MacArthur Park and Catherine O’Hara couldn’t give a dull line reading if she tried – she’s blessed with that Madeline Kahn ability to make the lamest dialogue screamingly funny. Jenna Ortega is essentially playing a marginally less sullen, and therefore less interesting, Wednesday, though she does so gamely. But Winona Ryder feels awkward and limited, spending much of the film perplexed, as if she’s listening to David Harbour accept an award (Google it). Michael Keaton was the Tabasco to the original – a little of him goes a long way. Here, he pops up more frequently, armed with trailer-friendly lines. He’s good at entrances and exits but not so much the middle bits.
And yet, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn’t boring. It’s undeniably entertaining – at times witty, at times dumb fun. If it’s a hit, maybe we’ll get ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’, but then we’ll really be in trouble.
► Beetlejuice Beetlejuice arrives in UK cinemas 6 September.