Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: Twice the Title, Half the Heart
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C+
I was asked in that immediate-reaction period after screening it, what I thought of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s decades-later sequel to Beetlejuice which opens this week.
My quip was that I’d attended funnier funerals. But to be fair, I’ve attended some pretty funny funerals.
What I think about it depends on what you’re asking. I will hunt down and haunt anyone who compares Beetlejuice Beetlejuice favourably to the original, so loudly does it scream “sequel!”
But yes, there are some laughs, despite the missing elements of surprise and delight. Most of them recall and build on the sight gags of the Afterlife that Burton brought us in 1988, when his goth-sensibilities ran free. There’s a demon baby that steals the movie for a minute, and kudos to whoever imagined a conveyance of the dead called the Soul Train (which, of course, is a never-ending disco party whose conductor seems to be Don Cornelius). And the dudes with the shrunken heads now seem designed to be the next Minions.
Heavy joke-writing is used as a filler for the overstuffed story, written by three people, including Seth Grahame-Smith, the gagmeister behind Lego Batman and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Beetlejuice had a simple enough story that left room for fun: young ghostly couple and a girl named Lydia who can see them (Winona Ryder), invoke a trickster demon named Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) to scare away the annoying humans who’ve bought the home they haunt. Then they must get rid of him.
Strip away the dross, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is equally simple. When her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) ends up trapped in the Afterlife, Lydia reluctantly invokes Betelgeuse to save her. Then she must get rid of him.
Unfortunately, that simple framework ended up stuffed with unnecessary characters, subplots and meandering narrative. These include two dead dads (Lydia’s and Astrid’s), Betelgeuse’s psychotic revived dead wife (Monica Bellucci), a “soul-sucker” who doesn’t get to do much other than make dead people deader, a dead actor (Willem Dafoe) who played a cop named Wolf Jackson on TV, and has taken on the role of Death Police in the Afterlife, a teenage ghost (Arthur Conti) whom Astrid falls for, the obnoxious producer of Lydia’s Haunted House reality series (Justin Theroux) who presumes to take on the role of Astrid’s step-dad. And on and on.
There are so many of these characters that their departures from the film often seem weirdly abrupt.
Awkward fact in the wake of so many Beetlejuice returnees: The movie opens with the death of Lydia’s dad Charles (husband to Lydia’s step-mom, played by Catherine O'Hara). Charles, is seems, was eaten by a shark.
If they’d hired the actual actor, Jeffrey Jones, it would have been his biggest role in nearly a quarter-century since he was declared a registered sex offender. Instead, we see his death via Claymation, and his picture over his grave at the funeral.
Well, that’s one less character who needed lines, using up screen-time.
Silver linings? Sure. It’s great to see O’Hara, Ryder and Ortega playing three generations of Deetz women. O’Hara still wears the role of performance artist Delia with imperious pride (in one art piece, she’s surrounded by birds, and I was briefly reminded of The Crows Have Eyes III: The Crowening, the cheap horror star-turn of her character Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek). And as generational goths, Ryder and Ortega make a convincing mom and moody daughter.
But in the end, all Beetlejuice Beetlejuice did for me was make me want to see the singular version again.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Directed by Tim Burton. Starring Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega and Michael Keaton. Opens in theatres Thursday, September 5.