The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
The original Beetlejuice is a classic and arguably one of the most original films released by a major studio since the 1970s. It’s a movie that I’ve probably watched a couple dozen times and I have fond memories of the cartoon from when I was a kid. Given the film’s popularity among people my age, it’s shocking that it took this long for us to get a sequel. That’s not to say that the studio didn’t try to make a sequel. Beetlejuice 2 has been in various levels of development since the early 90s (when it was famously going to be called Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian), but it just never seemed like the stars would align and the movie would actually get made.
But the age of the legacy sequel has finally brought the Ghost With The Most back from the grave an astounding 36 years after the release of the first movie. As best as I can tell, that makes it the second most belated sequel of all time after Mary Poppins Returns (which arrived 54 years after Mary Poppins). I wouldn’t say that I was optimistic about it, but I was cautiously hopeful. The trailers didn’t look great, but the band was (mostly) back together and I though that maybe, just maybe, they could recapture the magic of the original. Unfortunately, my hope was, as usual, tragically misguided because Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a hot fucking mess.
As a quick aside, this movie missed the perfect opportunity for an opening scene. It should have started in the waiting room where Betelgeuse was at the end of the first movie, waiting for his ridiculously long number to be called. The number is finally called, he looks at the camera and says “It’s showtime.” Cut to the title screen. There you go, Hollywood. A joke 36 years in the making that would provide an in-continuity explanation for the long gap between films. Somebody please hire me.
While Tim Burton and several key cast members have returned from the original, do you know who didn’t return? The writers and goddamn does it show. This is normally the point in the review when I would briefly describe the plot, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t really have a plot. The script is all over the damn place and lacks a central narrative, replacing it with many superfluous subplots and characters. It is as if the writers took random sections of various other Beetlejuice 2 scripts from over the years and just stapled them together.
In many ways, both general and oddly specific, the film suffers from the same issues as Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Just as in Frozen Empire, the villain (Betelgeuse’s ex-girlfriend, played by Monica Bellucci) is introduced in the beginning, completely disappears for most of the movie, then reappears at the end to be quickly defeated. Willem Dafoe is here as some sort of ghost detective and both Bellucci and Dafoe could be completely cut from the film and you wouldn’t notice that anything is missing. Meanwhile, Lydia now hosts a supernatural talk show and is still haunted by Betelgeuse for some reason even though he just viewed her as a means to an end in the original. The Deetz family returns to the old house when Charles (the father) dies. Lydia’s daughter Astrid (played by Jenna Ortega) resents her mom because her dad died in the Amazon and she calls bullshit on Lydia’s ability to speak to ghosts when she can’t communicate with the dead father. Astrid starts to get her mom’s ghost-seeing abilities and has a romantic subplot that is almost an exact duplicate of a subplot from Frozen Empire. Lydia has a douchebag boyfriend that is pressuring her for marriage because he wants her money. Betelgeuse again wants to marry Lydia for some reason. If this description feels disjointed, that’s because none of the events in the film feel sequential; it is just a bunch of shit happening at the same time with little relation to each other. If you asked me what the plot of this movie is, I honestly don’t know how I would answer you.
In the original, the narrative is driven by Barbara and Adam (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin), the normal characters that are forced to interact with the weirdness around them. Davis and Baldwin didn’t return for the sequel (the characters are written out so flippantly with a single line of dialogue that it transcends laziness and becomes legitimately funny), so that narrative core is also missing here. Instead of replacing them with similar characters, we are instead left with all of the weird supporting characters and the film reinforces why they are meant to be supporting characters and not the anchors of the story.
That brings us to another problem: Betelgeuse himself. Not the performance, mind you, as Michael Keaton slides back into the role with amazing ease considering the passage of time. The issue is that he is now a main character and that completely ruins the mystique. In the original, he is on screen for maybe 12-15 minutes. He was more of an off-screen presence that is used sparingly, maximizing his impact when he does finally appear. Here, he is on screen all the goddamn time and the schtick (like most schticks) wears thin when overexposed. Keaton is still giving it his all and has the trademark mannerisms and vocal cadence (if now a little more gruff sounding), but the script does the character a major disservice by putting him front and center for so much of the running time.
I’m not shy about my hatred for nostalgic callbacks and I’m happy to say that they aren’t as egregious as I had feared. They are still here and they still made me cringe, but they didn’t piss me off nearly as badly as something like Ghostbusters: Afterlife or Spiderman: No Way Home or even Alien Romulus. The most ridiculous is the completely asinine placement of the Banana Boat (Day-O) song that makes absolutely no sense in context, but the last act does resort to essentially recreating moments from the original. The wedding is done over again and so is the possessed-musical scene, with MacArthur Park replacing Banana Boat (Day-O). It really does just make one think about the remarkable originality of the first movie and how such magic can’t be recreated, as much as we wish it could be.
It isn’t all bad, though. While the screenwriters were sleeping, the productions designers and effects teams were hard at work recreating the Beetlejuice aesthetic. This is a great looking movie and, while it lacks the cool factor of seeing it for the first time, recreates the Halloween-on-acid feel of this world. The effects are mostly fantastic, done primarily with practical work and sparing use of CGI. There are a couple of really cool looking and fun sequences, particularly when Betelgeuse is first called upon, that show that the filmmakers were having fun and genuinely trying to recreate the zany kookiness of the first movie. And, as I mentioned, Keaton is still a blast in the role and the makeup looks fantastic. We should have seen a lot less of him, but I can’t fault the performance.
Most classic movies are lighting-in-a-bottle situations, especially comedies. You have to get the right people and bring them together just at the right point in their lives to create something that will likely never be replicated. There are exceptions and there are great sequels, of course, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is unfortunately just another modern legacy sequel without a compelling reason to exist other than money. There just wasn’t a story here worth telling, or at least one that the writers were able to convey. The problem with something as unique as Beetlejuice is that it can never be unique again, as much as we would like it to be for the sake of reliving our own memories. As for me, I can always watch the original again for the 30th time or so.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetlejuice_Beetlejuice#/media/File:Beetlejuice_Beetlejuice_poster.jpg
