Director: Tim Burton
Stars: Jenna Ortega, Monica Bellucci, Winona Ryder
If we’ve come to understand anything about the modus operandi of Hollywood, it is its craven capacity to milk a trend for all it’s worth. Horror remakes. Superhero movies. Most recently, it seems, legacy sequels, buoyed in no small way by crossover successes like Top Gun: Maverick or the (briefly) revitalised Scream franchise. “The people want more of this!” cry the suits in the boardrooms, and ticket sales tend to agree.
In truth the return of Beetlejuice prefigures this trend. This – or some version of this – has been on the cards for a couple of decades now, succumbing to the various costs of doing business. Only now – in the midst of what might soon become a glut – has it come to fruition. That might be a mixed blessing for the movie, which will be folded into this trend with your Twisters and your nu-Ghostbusters as YouTubers and the like turn anything and everything into IP mincemeat.
Like a lot of early Tim Burton movies for cinemagoers of a certain age, Beetlejuice is a personal film. An anarchic touchstone in their upbringing. Precious. Particularly because it’s director has long since gone off the rails. Burton’s decades-long descent into grotesque CG and endless remakes has long suggested a paucity of ideas, just a withering aesthetic that he’ll button onto anything going. He already remade his own Frankenweenie. His further public self-cannibalisation seemed somehow inevitable and depressing.
With expectations in the toilet its heartening to report that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (stop underlining that, spellcheck. Ignore! Ignore all!) is Burton’s most invigorating work in decades. It’s as though he’s woken from a slumber. And while there’s a persistent inelegance to the thing, that renewed bite and fervour for the chaotic is buoyed by a cast that seem uniformly thrilled to be there to entertain us. And entertain us they shall… eventually.
It takes a while for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to get its undead ducks in a row. Flitting clumsily between the worlds of the living and the dead (in a manner confusing enough to baffle the uninitiated), we catch up with the returning players. Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is now an Elvira-esque TV presenter channeling the spirits for live audiences under the guidance of her insufferable new age manager Roy (Justin Theroux). She’s called back to Winter River with her artist mother Delia (Catharine O’Hara) and daughter Astrid (welcome addition Jenna Ortega) on learning that her father Charles (the disgraced Jeffrey Jones – absent presumably due to avoid controversy) has suddenly passed away, having been partially eaten by a shark. Meanwhile, in the afterlife, Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) is trying to keep out of the clutches of his newly reconstituted ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci); a soul-sucker who just goes to show that kooky auteurs will do anything for a bit of Monica Bellucci in their sequels (fine by me).
It’s haphazard and clumsy, and for almost an hour Beetlejuice Beetlejuice teases the anarchic fun of its predecessor without fully delivering. The cast’s enthusiasm tips toward the madcap to come and keeps us onboard. Theroux is more than willing to play class clown for the audience and, elsewhere, Willem Dafoe hams it up wildly as an amusing former movie cop trying to work out who’s been filleting ghouls of their filling. But a lot of it is about getting us up to speed, dealing with Charles’ memory, the slow return to the roots of the original.
Once ready to let rip, however, Burton does so with aplomb, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice transforms into a rambunctious riot of ideas (old and new), gags and lip-synched musical numbers. Whoever decided this ought to be a vehicle for introducing an entire new generation to the song ‘MacArthur Park’ deserves a bonus. In particular there’s a show-stopping church wedding set piece that pays for the ticket price alone, evoking the spirit of The Rocky Horror Picture Show better than any pale imitator this writer can think of.
And while Bellucci’s corpse bride Delores is something of a red herring along the way, its wryly amusing to see the film’s real antagonists hiding in plain sight. Like a cautionary tale handed down from mothers to daughters it seems there’s nothing as untrustworthy as a sensitive-seeming nice boy who listens to Sigur Rós and the Pixies (oh no).
It’s something of a relief that most of the movie’s inevitable lumpen callbacks fit right in. The funereal retooling of Harry Belafonte’s ‘Day O’ works a charm in context. Delia’s old art has been cannily repurposed. Miles Millar and Alfred Gough’s script is smart enough to play on audience expectations as well. By the time Astrid loses control of her bicycle in the town thoroughfare and starts careering into the path of anything that moves, we already think we’re two steps ahead of the movie, and this is going to be the sceptical teen’s calamitous entry point into the land of the dead. But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice zigs instead of zags. It may delay the third-act bedlam a little, but its a welcome detour in retrospect.
Everyone’s having fun here. Ryder seems in her element. Keaton loosens back into the titular menace with ease. And Burton himself seems more playful and invigorated. Another movie highlight is a two-minute love letter to the halcyon days of Mexican horror, played in Spanish and with more raucous punk spirit than anything Burton’s done since, well, Beetlejuice. This feels like a homecoming for the director, not just the characters.
This sense of occasion patches over some glaring faults, particularly in the film’s uneven narrative construction and some of its less successful attempts to court big laughs (the less said about attempt(s) to generate its own Mini Me the better), meaning that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice thrives in the moment. Perhaps most heartening – given Burton’s inclinations lately – is its deference to the handmade. Costumes, puppets, set design and make-up are the departments doing the heavy-lifting rather than the overworked VFX guys. It’s not always the case (see Delores’ resurrection), but there’s enough earthen creativity in evidence to make this feel like a worthy – if deranged – successor to a beloved original.
The Lost Highway Hotel 