Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) … At the drive-in. Went all the way retro with this one.
Watched the original during Halloween last year, and said at the time “there’s no way this movie gets made today.” Now that the sequel has come out more than 30 years later, I stand by that statement.
This is a pure nostalgia romp that doesn’t bring much new to the universe or narrative, and if not anchored to a resurrected IP from the 80s, would not be greenlit today. As such, it falls right into modern Hollywood’s business model of selling your childhood back to you and building franchises from a foundation of fond memories.
In fact, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice plays as the third part of a trilogy in which the middle movie is conspicuously absent. A ton of major plot points from the intervening years between the two films are little more than brief lines of dialogue that really could have been their own movie had Burton gotten around to making it 10-20 years ago.
That isn’t to say the film is devoid of fun. Keaton is still fantastic as Beetlejuice and his new origin story is exactly what you’d want it to be. Monica Bellucci as his ex-wife from a throw-away gag in the original is excellent if woefully underused. Catherine O’Hara and Willem Dafoe are clearly having a blast in their respective roles. And the way Burton implements the now problematic actor Jeffery Jones in the fairly essential role of Charles Deetz is nothing short of hilariously brilliant.
Still, there are around 4 to 5 individual plot lines occurring at the same time, which are all fun and not particularly hard to follow, but end up diminishing each other as they fight for screen time. Then it becomes too exposition heavy at the beginning, a mess of plot lines in the middle, and a rush to the end as the original’s third act is practically copy-pasted whole cloth.
Overall, equal parts fun and creepy, with good callbacks while building on the world, themes and set pieces of the first one.
But little more than nostalgia brain candy and I’m surprisingly disappointed this didn’t open with Beetlejuice finally getting his number called in the waiting room.