Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) – Review

“BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE”

A very long in development sequel, Tim Burton now returns to direct a follow up to his 1988 film, Beetlejuice, which surprisingly manages to get most of the cast back, bar a few exceptions; one which we will go into detail on, which will affect the review.

Suffice to say, this is a full-on true sequel, and I actually found it interesting where Burton has decided to expand upon.

I actually went into this film rather cynically, I felt that it was only coming out because Dumbo failed and Burton needed something that was guaranteed to make money no matter what, and I was especially worried because most of the trailers I saw didn’t give away much of the plot and were very coy about what was going to be in the film (at least the ones I saw in cinemas were this way).

Going through the plot for this film is going to be a bit weird, because there’s quite a lot going on. It mainly centres around Lydia and Delia, played once again by Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, who travel back to the film from the first movie, along with Lydia’s daughter, Astrid, played by Jenna Ortega, for the funeral of Charles (the husband and dad from the first movie). Meanwhile, we also have a woman from Beetlejuice’s past, sucking souls away in the underworld and coming after Beetlejuice (once again played by Michael Keaton), and Beetlejuice is again trying to finish off what he started with Lydia in the first movie.

There are a few plot points that go on around Lydia getting married to a producer named Rory (Justin Theroux) as well as Astrid have a quasi-romance with a local named Jeremy (Arthur Conti) but this all brings me to a major point of this movie: there are WAY too many plot points. They at least have resolutions to a certain extent, so nothing gets lost, but the film is a bit more concerned about giving Keaton more to do.

Keaton is on form as Beetlejuice once again, it’s obviously been a long time between movies, so I was concerned, and he obviously has a very different look now than he did in 1988, but the makeup does make it so he looks like the original character.

And again, they got most of the cast back. Obviously, some actors couldn’t come back. I imagine at the time of filming Alec Baldwin was going through too much legal trouble at the time to want to do this movie. I think it was a fine decision to write them out, since otherwise you would have to explain why ghosts are now ageing.

The obvious one who didn’t come back was Jeffrey Jones as Charles Deetz, who Burton ethically couldn’t bring back, so his character was going to be killed off in between movies. In this case, Burton decided to use it as the inciting incident. They had to do this in a way that acknowledged the crimes that he was convicted of, so the death they give him is excessively violent, which I thought would be all well and good, but they show his picture so much in the movie, not just on the gravestone, but to a point where it made me think, ‘Why didn’t they just have him run off with someone else between movies?’ because now we’re getting so many reminders of the man that played this character, and we don’t want to be reminded of this guy! That being said, I think Burton handled this well.

I think all of the cast gave excellent performances, considering the ridiculous nature of some of the things that they have to do, particularly Keaton himself.

Jenna Ortega who gained recent fame from the Scream movie, as well as the Wednesday Netflix series did well, and I particularly enjoy newcomer Willam Dafoe who gets to ham it up in a way that does this film a service.

The biggest problem I had with this movie wasn’t the humour- which actually succeeds on a few levels, one scene in particular had me in hysterics- and it’s not the length of the movie, it’s paced quite well and comes at about 1 hour and 40 minutes, it’s that this film has to really rush its climax because there is too much going on! There are three antagonists- that is WAY too much for the runtime and I only really liked one of them; the other two are so underdeveloped that I didn’t really care. The other issue is that Burton didn’t really know how to end this movie, so some of the plot points kind of just stopped without a satisfying climax, so they had to just pull something out of thin air, which kind of works in a Beetlejuice movie, but I still felt it was a bit rushed. It reminded me of another Burton film, which is Batman Returns, which had a similar issue.

One thing that I really loved in this movie were the set designs and the costumes. The Spirit World is really expanded upon in this movie, and they manage to do a good job updating some of the original designs with modern technology. If anything, I think that this should get some nominations in the technical category when award season comes around.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, but I would say it’s a mixed bag. It’s got some good humour in parts, the casting is very well done, the first two thirds are well done- but the downside is that by the time  you get to the third act, there’s a bit too much going on, so it makes the ending feel rushed.