In that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice works at all is a goddamn miracle of direction. It’s so bloated with plots, subplots, characters, side characters, cameos, villains, and new ideas that I’m still not sure if they resolved everything.
The plot synopsis? Where to even start? Lydia Deitz (Winona Ryder) returns to the house from the first film with her step-mom (Catherine O’Hara) and her daughter (Jenna Ortega) in tow. And… Beetlejuice is lurking around and there’s a new villain, and another new villain, and things take a long time to come into play, vanish for awhile, and then resolve too quickly. And it takes a long time to establish what is probably the main plot… around forty-five minutes of character and location set-ups. And I’m not really sure it had found its focus even then.
The film suffers from one of the problems from the new Ghostbusters movies. Too many characters from the original movies mixed with way too many new characters. And everyone has a plot and a subplot and maybe yet another subplot. Some of these storylines don’t make much sense, some start slow and have nice reveals, and I have no idea what the point of most of it is other than to stuff two movies into one.
Yet I was never bored… though sometimes a little impatient as to why all of this was in one script and when we were gonna get back to some of the subplots. There’s a new villain who is so on-point as a Tim Burton goth character that I wanted more of her. There’s a romance for Jenna Ortega that takes an interesting turn… and then kind of ends abruptly. Ryder has her own plotlines, O’Hara her own out-of-nowhere head-scratching subplot, and there’s dance numbers, undead cops, guys with shrunken heads, and a killer reference to Soul Train that will make most people under forty confused.
There’s also a surprising amount of four letter words for a sequel to Beetlejuice. And a ton more actual gore… the spurting kind, not the fun but harmlessly ghoulish kind. They must have been skirting that R rating constantly.
Beetlejuice himself is honestly a little too toned down… which is ironic since I just wrote a review of the first movie saying he was too over-the-top. I don’t know if they were trying to keep a PG-13 (ironic given the above paragraph) or if Keaton wasn’t feeling his younger self. Or maybe they were trying to keep him a relatable anti-hero for a sequel.
It sounds like I hate the film but I don’t. I’m very frustrated with it and can’t believe they filmed the whole gosh darn script instead of giving it a huge trim. It’s not the kind of movie that’s gonna demand rewatches so much as the desire to just rewatch the far simpler, funnier, and more family friendly, original.
Though I suspect this movie is gonna do huge box office given the crowds for the early screening. And I want it to since we need a third movie called Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (naturally).
Score: 77