Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

There are two things to admire about director Tim Burton in 2024. One, he still loves practical effects, which at least saves long-overdue sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice from looking like CGI slop. The second is that he’s loyal to his team of regulars, which explains why he brought in Wednesday scribes Alfred Gough and Miles Millar to write the script. Yet while that show was massively successful, the script was its weakest point – not least because it fundamentally misunderstood what makes the Addams Family so mordantly hilarious. With Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, it really feels like revivals aren’t their thing,

1988’s Gothic comedy Beetlejuice was the story of the Maitlands. Played in the original by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, they were an affable middle-class couple who suddenly found themselves in the realm of the undead. They were the audience proxy, and the fact that the hugely successful Broadway musical adaptation of the original centers even more heavily on them shows their potential. This time, they’re written out with a single line, and the narrative centers on the three generations of the very much alive Deetz women: the Maitlands’ best friend Lydia (Ryder), who now hosts a bad TV talk show about ghosts; her sullen daughter Astrid (Wednesday star Ortega, who is now officially too old to play one-note grumpy teens); and Lydia’s recently widowed stepmother Delia (O’Hara, deliciously over-the-top). Oh, and of course, there’s bioexorcist Beetlejuice (the inimitable Keaton), the demon horndog still pining for Lydia.

What made the younger Burton interesting and exciting was his unique and instantly recognizable style combined with a certain wild kineticism about his directing. But what was signature then is now just a hackneyed grab bag of quirks: super-saturated colors, black-and-white stripes, mimed needle drops, plaid-skirted schoolgirls, covered bridges, jokes about the hollow bourgeoisie, and even an homage to the tree from Sleepy Hollow.

Worse, Burton and his writing team waste the opportunity of a sequel to fix the errors of the past, and instead double down on the most problematic elements of the original. So, while we don’t get the Maitlands, the audience is subjected to the face of convicted sex offender and child pornographer Jeffrey Jones as the late Charles Deetz. As for anyone wondering whether there are finally any Black people in Burton’s afterlife, the answer is yes – but merely to facilitate a protracted Soul Train joke. In 2024.

The fact that some of you are probably now looking up Soul Train shows how bizarrely belated this sequel is. Thirty-five years ago, Tim Burton was prepared to take risks. The first two sequel scripts he was looking at – including one by Beetlejuice co-writer and former Texas Film Commission Executive Director Warren Skaaren – were set in Paris and Hawaii. This feels like a lounge singer cover version of a Cure song.

And what, you may be asking, of Beetlejuice himself? Well, you’ll be asking that question during the film. On paper, there’s really not much of the bioexorcist in the original, but the combination of Keaton’s unhinged performance and Burton’s bottomless pit of sight gags let him dominate the room like the life and soul of the party who double-dips and spikes the punch. This time around he’s a guest star in his own movie, pursued by the even more ill-served Monica Bellucci as his soul-sucking ex-wife, and Willem Dafoe hamming it up in a dead-end subplot as an afterlife cop. Sometimes, the dead should just stay buried.