While filming an episode for her paranormal tv show, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) races off stage when she thinks she saw Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) in the audience.  Catching her breath in her dressing room, she checks her phone and learns that her father has recently passed.  Lydia and her mother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), pick up her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), from school and return to Lydia’s childhood home in Winter River to prepare for her father’s final arrangements.  On the eve of Halloween, Lydia’s boyfriend and producer, Rory (Justin Theroux), wants to turn the funeral into a wedding celebration, proposing to her during the wake.  Betelgeuse, however, has his own plans to finally marry Lydia and will not let Rory stand in his way. 

Tim Burton revives one of his earliest successes with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a legacy sequel – though the term feels like a cheapening of this title – to the Keaton starring 1988 classic for Warner Brothers.  With many of the core cast returning to compliment the fresher faces, the 104-minute film has the director’s trademarked Gothic style and features many of the iconic elements that make the original so beloved.  With Alfred Gough and Miles Millar taking over at the typewriter, the film does at times feel like it is traveling down a similar track to the original, but it still offers plenty of new and surprising elements to capture a new generation and delight the returning audience. 

In the same way that the original was a story about a mother and daughter, then Lydia and Delia, so too is the sequel which finds Lydia now a single mother to Astrid after her husband was involved in a boating accident in the Amazon and his body never recovered.  The film smartly plays with the parallels between the dynamic of daughter, mother, and grandmother in how they all reject aspects of their elders while refusing to admit those same qualities are perpetuated through themselves, often to comic and later poignant effect.  The chemistry shared between the three leading ladies is enough to mount the entire film on, so much so that when the titular Betelgeuse takes over the action of the film, it is almost jarring in how severely the tone shifts into slapstick. 

What Betelgeuse’s scenes do capitalize on and eventually shift the film into is a top-shelf brand of gag humor that surprisingly still works even with today’s sensibilities that often reject this lower-brow style of comedy; but more often than not, it is seldom handled with the precise care it needs.  This is because the film feels like a time capsule from the 80s in its insistence on practical effects and its allegiance to the production design of the original, here managed by Mark Scruton.  The tangible nature of the film is both unmatched and unseen in the modern landscape and adds a great flair to the film, even when it reiterates some of the same gags.  It walks right up to the line with some of its innuendos but never feels like it is trying to push the boundaries on its PG13 rating, and it finds that sweet spot of cross-generational humor that really makes it a film you can take your daughter, mother, or grandmother too.  The important thing – though, again, the thing that holds it back – is that while it touches on many of the same jokes and elements of the original, the original is far from required viewing and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice stands well on its own.  This results in some jokes feeling more like heavy-handed references or fan service instead of something more organic in nature, but even looking at these touchstones, the scriptwriting team does its best to recontextualize the fan service into its own joke in its own film.  

One of the smartest things the film does is flipflop on audience expectations of Ortega in the film.  Having made herself into something modern scream queen attached to the revitalized Scream franchise as well as the titular Wednesday in the hit Netflix show, and an appearance in X (2022) , she feels at home in the world of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but the film is not content to simply ride the wave of her pop-horror iconography.  She almost plays the straight man in this story which has rejected all notion of the supernatural since her mother’s affiliation with it has labeled her and her family as freaks.  She also gets caught in a convoluted plot with Jeremy (Arthur Conti), an introverted neighborhood flame who is harboring a dark secret that he hides in his treehouse or the attic of his family home where he collects his classic records.  This twist adds a nice flair to the film because the thought of a YA meet-cute seemed antithetical to the film’s goal of reclaiming tropes and filtering them through a horror-tinted lens, but our patience pays off in how this plot is resolved. 

The real problem with Jeremy and how he does not feel an organic part of the film is that he is just one of so many plot lines that overstuff this comparably short film and leave audiences feeling uncomfortably bloated.  In addition to all of this, there is yet another romance brewing that seems like it would help frame the story but is wholly undeserved and could be cut without much consequence.  Delores (Monica Bellucci), Betelgeuse’s betrothed when he was alive centuries ago, has come back and is in search of him so that they may be rejoined for eternity.  There are large swathes of the film in which Delores is absent not just from the frame but from even being mentioned so that when she does show up for a brief scene to show she is just a few steps behind Betelgeuse, Belluccia, as an actress, is further saddled with nothing to do which makes her story feel like even heavier dead weight.  This is to say nothing of a separate line that is operating largely independently involving Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), a stunt actor who died filming an action-cop drama and is still stuck in character.  Very few of these lines get the attention they deserve, and though the original is also a very full 92 minutes, there is a better balance and curation there so that everything is actively building up towards its dinner table farce.  Beetlejuice Beetlejuice also ends with an elaborate song and dance number as everything collides, but the film has dragged on too long for the youngest in the audience to still be locked in and it is too nonsensical with its references for the returning audience members to really care. 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is still a satisfying film and a satisfying sequel because it is able to bring so many of the original cast back, including its director, so it does feel like an actual labor of love and not just green-lit fan fiction at best or soulless studio cash-grab at worst as many of these legacy sequels can often be categorized as.  Keaton does not seem to have aged a day in the role, pumping the trickster with the same manic energy that we know and love.  His inclusion is a strange ratio entering the film much earlier than in the first film, but there is no point in hiding him now as we are here specifically to see his antics.  That being said, his character also falls victim to the unbalanced script that struggles to use him as effectively as before, but Keaton brings his all to the role so even while the film is not as resounding a formal success as it would like to be, the individual elements all do provide enjoyment.  It is as if they tried to cram all the ideas of a sequel and part three into one film and it really weighed down the effectiveness of the film they were actually making.  Hopefully, we will not be saying Betelgeuse three times in reference to a new title a year or two down the line as this sequel has already proven that too much of a good thing is exactly that, too much, and to triple down on it so soon would be a worse fate for the character than being devoured by a sandworm.