Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Nice to see that Tim Burton still has a good movie in him.

Obviously it’s another legacy sequel, but that’s more of an indictment of the state of big-budget Hollywood movies than of Burton. And if you’re going to do a sequel to a pop classic from the Eighties, you can do worse and more banal than Beetlejuice. A lot of the core players return for this one, and nobody is just repeating their shtick from the Eighties. If you’re going to make a legacy sequel, try to do it like this.

Like every legacy sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about the longevity of its predecessor. Lydia Deetz is a middle-aged celebrity, coasting on the fumes of her traumatic childhood. Her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) hates her for her emotional absence and her ghost bullshit. Delia Deetz is the curator of the worst Brooklyn art show you’ve ever seen. Justin Theroux is Lydia’s awful and exploitative manager, and one of the funniest parts of the movie. And Jeffrey Jones’ character is fucking dead under hilarious circumstances.

Meanwhile in the netherworld, Beetlejuice is working a shitty desk job while trying to outrun his ex-wife Monica Bellucci. His assistant Bob has a shitty little afterlife. And Willem Dafoe is an action movie star spending his afterlife as a ghost police detective.

With that setup, all the movie really has to do is let the characters run wild. And it does just that, allowing these characters to run in and out of each other’s paths. It’s cleaner than it could be, although a lot of subplots end abruptly (not forgotten, just resolved very quickly). The results are hardly radical, but they’re great fun. More of this and less Mary Poppins Returns, please. Michael Keaton, stop motion, grim ghost shenanigans, and goofy lip syncing is all you really need from a night at the movies.…

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