Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

As in life itself, success or failure in filmmaking depends heavily on timing and opportunity. Those two largely uncontrollable forces have served Tim Burton well for more than forty years as a filmmaker. After studying animation at CalArts, Burton landed an apprenticeship at Walt Disney Productions, getting to work on movies like The Fox and the Hound and Tron while in his early twenties. The early ’80s were a strange and challenging time for Disney and though you’d think that might bring swift advancement for the strange, creative, young Burton, he moved on after one of two short films he got to direct there caught the eye of Paul Reubens. Burton made his feature directing debut on Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and that lively, eccentric comedy led to Warner Bros. having Burton make Beetlejuice and then the top-grossing film of 1989, Batman.

Now, Burton returns to the world of his second film in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the first and only sequel he’s directed since 1992’s Batman Returns. Although thirty-six years have passed since the original Beetlejuice, the timing could not feel more right for Burton, who has endured the decades as a household name with a distinct brand of offbeat fare and as many big commercial successes as failures. He returns along with three original cast members who have retained relevance and popularity through career ups and downs: Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, and, in the title role, Michael Keaton. Thanks to their recent successes on “Stranger Things”, on “Schitt’s Creek”, and in an assortment of decorated and high-profile films including Best Picture Oscar winners Birdman and Spotlight, Ryder, O’Hara, and Keaton revive their characters as genuine stars without missing a beat and that is one of the most alluring features of a sequel that is poised to be one of the two biggest hits of the fall movie season it opens.

For moviegoers who were not yet born in 1988, a vast demographic this film needs as much as any, there is 21-year-old Jenna Ortega, following Burton over from their popular Netflix collaboration “Wednesday”, a series that has kept executive producer Burton hip and popular with those too young to remember a time when The Nightmare Before Christmas wasn’t a merchandise mainstay at Hot Topic.

The sequel opens in the present-day with middle-aged Lydia Deetz (Ryder) now the host of a popular ghost house series. Lydia’s teenaged daughter Astrid (Ortega) does not believe in ghosts, which has added strain to a relationship fraught with it. The skepticism stems not only from Astrid’s inherited adolescent stubborness but also the fact that the widowed Lydia has never been able to see or contact Astrid’s beloved and deceased father.

The sudden death of Lydia’s own father, ornithologist Charles, sets the plot of this sequel in motion. That death reestablishes the still-extensive link between the world as we know it and the afterlife. It also brings us back to Winter River and the hill-topping house where Lydia first made contact with the undead. As Lydia’s stepmother, Soho artist Delia (O’Hara), mourns the loss of her husband, Lydia’s controlling, New Agey producer Rory (Justin Theroux) seizes the opportunity to propose to her, conceiving a midnight wedding just two days later on Halloween night.

It is not a question of if but how these people will summon the crude semi-titular “bio-exorcist” back into their lives. Lydia has recently been haunted by glimpses of the decaying creep she nearly married as a teenager. Betelgeuse, meanwhile, has a soul-sucking ex (Monica Bellucci) who is out for revenge and hot on his trail.

Written by “Wednesday” creators/showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who share story credit with genre-seasoned writer-producer Seth Grahame-Smith (the primary writer of Burton’s 2012 movie Dark Shadows), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is more than a little bit of a mess. There are layers to this sequel that barely connect to one another, the most glaring of which is Bellucci’s reassembled and stapled-together vamp Delores, who leaves dead men a shrunken rubbery mess after sucking their souls away. This fringe villainess feels very much born out of Burton and Bellucci’s romantic relationship; while kind of striking on its own terms, it has little consequence on anything else that goes down here, which you notice as the thread disappears for large stretches of screentime. The same inessential quality pervades the minor arc of Willem Dafoe as a dead B-movie cop determined to “keep it real” as he investigates Delores’ lethal pursuits. It’s hard to find anything nice to say about this procedural angle other than it brings Burton and Dafoe together for the very first time.

The film fares much better when it’s focusing on characters we already know and care about. It holds our interest as the wry Astrid has her attention caught by the gangly, Dostoevsky-reading Jeremy (Arthur Conti) and sets up a spontaneous Halloween evening pre-wedding date that is less romcomy than it first seems.

Perhaps not that surprisingly, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is at its most enjoyable when Keaton is on screen. Assigned the “and” credit in the first film, Keaton takes top billing here, but remains a sparkplug of a supporting presence here, his unhinged, unpredictable comic mayhem doled out in moderate doses. In a career that will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary next year, this must be Keaton’s most iconic and signature role. The thrill of seeing him back in his black and white suit — hair wild, tummy protruding, green goo bordering his every feature — cannot be overstated. It eclipses the similarly long-improbable novelty of him reprising Batman just last year in the now-overhated The Flash. There are so few chances for an actor to reprise an iconic role decades later with the magic intact. The usual concerns arising from such an undertaking — key personnel being left out of the creative process, the desperation and creative stagnation of untimely revival, the sheer aging on an actor’s face — are largely absent here, which allows us to just have fun with this.

For a three-star movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice offers an unusual amount of fun. This is such an alluring universe to return to and to do so in a major film and not some kind of streaming service subscription selling point is truly a delight. To do so with big studio backing, a robust budget, and no shortage of practical effects only adds to the charm.

Burton has not had a ton of big screen success lately. He’s made just two films in the past ten years — Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and 2019’s live-action Dumbo — and no one is getting wistful about either. You could argue that most of his films are not conventionally satisfying and that his two best works — Big Fish and Ed Wood — are the ones that feel least like “a Tim Burton movie.” But this Beetlejuice sequel lets him play in his old wheelhouse in a way that feels right and well-earned. Its inevitable commercial success will feel less about this one particular movie and more about the appealing, imaginative Gothy vibes his life’s work has given us.

Post-script: Over the years, a number of Burton collaborators have faced “cancellation” of sorts. Certainly, Paul Reubens back in the day and Johnny Depp now. Perhaps the most irreversible career death and most indefensible personal transgression belong to Jeffrey Jones, the actor who played Lydia’s father Charles Deetz in the original film and in 2002 pled no contest to soliciting a minor for production of obscene matter. Jones, who is best known as Principal Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and also acted in Burton’s Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow does not reprise the role of Charles here, but Burton almost seems to take wicked delight in refusing to pretend that the unhirable Jones is really dead, using his likeness in a portrait, a prominent gravestone, and even a stop-motion animated sequence.

Less impacted by some damning accusations is Burton’s ride-or-die composer Danny Elfman, whose score is among the original film’s greatest pleasures and whose new score is gladly on-brand.