The Dark Herald Recommends: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
It’s not the worst thing I’ve seen this year. I have to give it that. I’m afraid I can’t give it a lot else.
Beetlejuice x 2, is a sequel that feels like a sequel. Tim Burton didn’t really want to make it. Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega didn’t really want to star in it. But Michael Keaton delivered on it.
I suspect this movie only got made in the first place because Ryder and Keaton’s stock has risen in the past few years.
The movie opens with Lydia Deetz starring in a ghost hunter show. She is still dressing the same way she did in 1988, which is a bad start because being a goth into your fifties is not a thing. Anyway, she still sees dead people but now it’s a well-paying job. And she has started having flashbacks of Beetlejuice. We meet her sleazy boyfriend/producer. She is very dependent on him. She also mentions that she and her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) have been mostly estranged since the death of Astrid’s father.
Lydia gets a call from her stepmother Catherine O’Hara informing her, that Lydia’s own father has just conveniently died. Why is that convenient? Because it facilitates the story while lowering the budget.
Beetlejuice (2024) will probably make a profit but not much of one with a $147 million budget. The first one only cost $15 million in 1988. It wasn’t that expensive to make and truthfully neither was this if you don’t count actors, producers, and stakeholder fees. It was the talent involved that drove up the ticket on this project. Which explains why Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis didn’t even have a cameo. That and Alec’s recent legal problems are troubling to the family film market. However, Baldwin’s legal issues are nothing compared to Jeffery Jones’s, at least so far as the family market is concerned. They did use Jones’ likeness which means he got paid but that was the extent of his involvement unless he did uncredited voice work.
So Lydia, her stepmother, and Astrid go back to the town of NAMEHERE* in New England where the first movie took place. It turns out that Astrid is mad at her mother because she can’t contact her father.
Skipping ahead quite a lot. Astrid starts up a relationship with a local boy after she bonks her head while riding a bicycle. She develops a crush on him and then he reveals that he’s a ghost but with her help, he can come back to life. They cross over the threshold together into the land of the dead.
But it turns out he’s totally evil. He’s trying to trick Astrid into swapping places with him so she’ll be stuck in the land of the dead and he’ll come back to life somehow (just roll with it).
Lydia desperate to save her daughter and having no choices left, summons Beetlejuice and hilarity ensues.
I am cutting a LOT out of this movie, which is something Tim Burton should have done.
There are some scenes that work and are fun to watch. Michael Keaton kills it once again as the demi-demonic Beetlejuice. He delivers just as much of a high-energy performance today as he did forty years ago. You wouldn’t know he was in his seventies.
The problem is that there are too many subplots that really don’t contribute anything to the main story. Most of these spring from the subplot concerning Beetlejuice’s wife, Delores (played by Monica Belluci). I’m a long-time fan of Belluci but that doesn’t mean she belongs in everything. Delores’ plan to destroy Beetlejuice and all the cast bloat that came along for the ride with that subplot could have been so easily lifted out of the movie that I can’t think why Burton didn’t do it.
I’ve thought of a reason. Lets conduct a quick test.
Googling now: “Who is Tim Burton currently dating?”
Answer: Monica Belluci
*sigh*
This is rather typical of Ole Tim. First, it was an actress named Lisa Marie (no relation) who was so wooden he had to give her non-speaking roles whenever possible. When he moved to Helena Bonham Carter the acting was no longer an issue and her general weirdness dovetailed nicely with his movies, but he always moves on. So now it’s Monica Belluci, who still has it going on at 59 but her character added nothing but unneeded running time to this movie. For that matter neither did William Dafoe’s story about a dead actor turned undead police detective who was hunting her. It all added to the movie’s biggest problem; you can’t figure out what the question of the story is.
In the first movie that question was can Lydia become committed to living her life while making the ghosts of Adam and Barbara a part of her family? Beetlejuice was more of a facilitating character than a real antagonist.
But this movie has too many questions to allow for a coherent story. Can Astrid and Lydia reconcile? Can Astrid find peace with the death of her father? Can Beetlejuice avoid being destroyed by wife? Can William Dafoe’s character do whatever he was supposed to be doing? Can Lydia’s stepmother become slightly less obnoxious?
There are just too many point-of-view characters.
Its working script started life in 2011, so who knows what the story was originally about. Astrid’s father disappeared in the Amazon and his body was never found. Since Lydia could never see him, I suspect in the first version he turned out to be alive. In the final version, he was eaten by Pyrannas. There were a bunch of other overcooked story ideas like this.
Burton made multiple POV storylines work in Mars Attacks but that was a very different kind of story. Here it’s just out of place. It’s really not his core strength.
Was there anything I liked?
I was surprised when the awkward, skinny, greasy black-haired, but artistically inclined Teenage Burton Trope turned out to be the villain. In every other Burton movie from Edward Scissorhands to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the Teenage Burton Trope is a protagonist (as well as a self-insert). Making him one the antagonists was a nice change of pace.
The other thing I liked was Michael Keaton’s performance. He delivered, no question about it. He may as well have stepped out of a time machine from 1988, his performance was that pitch-perfect. Whatever they paid him, he earned every dime of it.
And he’s the only reason I am giving this mess a higher rating than I normally would. If you genuinely loved Keaton’s work in 1988 and want more, well this movie delivers on that and is worth the price of admission. Just keep in mind you will have to slog your way through a lot of filler to get to those scenes.
The Dark Herald Recommends with (reluctant) Confidence (2.75/5)
*It doesn’t matter what its name is and I can’t be bothered to look it up
