Tim Burton’s sequel ‘surpasses the original in almost every respect’

The director’s first sequel to his classic supernatural comedy in 36 years is a fun, funny farce packed with knockout punchlines and fantastic special effects.

Betelgeuse has returned from the dead. Or rather, Betelgeuse is still dead, but it’s back from the dead anyway. It’s been a whopping 36 years since Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice introduced us to Michael Keaton’s diabolical bastard, but Hollywood being Hollywood, they can’t let their intellectual property rest in peace forever. So Burton directed the sequel, Beetlejuice, which opened the year. Venice Film Festival.

I can’t say I had high expectations – the last 1980s supernatural comedy to get a sequel after decades of waiting was a disappointment. Ghostbusters: AfterlifeI’m relieved to report that Beetlejuice is something of a weirder, gorier, and overall meaner equivalent of Beetlejuice. Top Gun: MaverickSo this is the first sequel in 36 years that pays intelligent and loving homage to its predecessor while surpassing it in almost every way (Conveniently, of course, Keaton was smeared with copious amounts of corpse makeup in the first film, so his version of Betelgeuse looks pretty much the same as it did in 1988).

The most pleasant surprise is that Beetlejuice is that rare big-budget comedy that’s actually funny. The script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar is packed with shocking punchlines, and Burton’s visual gags are hilarious while pushing the boundaries of how wacky and creepy a Hollywood blockbuster can be. Crucially, instead of relying on CGI, it uses live-action effects like puppets, prosthetics, and loads of mucus, all of which make the jokes funnier and more disturbing.

The only flaw in the film is that it has too many storylines, which makes the middle part drag and the ending rushed and confusing. More time should have been spent on Betelgeuse, as in the original Beetlejuice. Keaton’s snorting troublemaker now works an office job in the underworld, a nightmarish bureaucracy populated by lost souls with various forms of bodily mutilation so horrifying it stokes the imagination. But he still misses Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the disaffected goth girl he tried to marry in the first film. Lydia is now a “psychic medium” and TV show host produced by a wonderfully self-centered boyfriend (Justin Theroux). She also has Astrid (Jenna Ortega), a disaffected teenager who is embarrassed by her false claims that her mother can see the dead; and Lydia is still struggling with her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara). D’Elia is a screamingly narcissistic artist, while O’Hara’s Schitt’s Creek character comes across as timid and withdrawn in comparison.

As with Top Gun: Maverick, the long gap between the original and the new films has paid off in its favor: Beetlejuice doesn’t seem like a rehash, and stands as a comedy with its own story and its own themes. It gets very moving about the difficulties of dealing with aging, parenthood and bereavement. But then it always reverts back to being gory and cartoonishly ridiculous.

The idea is that the various Deetz family members come together when Lydia’s father is murdered. The actor who played him, Jeffrey Jones, is now a registered sex offender, which is probably why he wasn’t invited back. When the family gathers at the haunted house that Betelgeuse invaded from the other side years ago, the ghosts played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in the original film are not there. (When Lydia justifies why they’re no longer there, Astrid says, “How convenient.”) But Beetlejuice is still beginning to creak under the weight of all its characters: Astrid is given a love interest (Arthur Conti), Betelgeuse is pursued by his vengeful, Morticia Addams-like ex-wife (Monica Bellucci), and Willem Dafoe plays a vain ex-actor who works as a detective in the afterlife because of the roles he played in the movies. No wonder the writers can’t keep track of everything that’s going on.

Beetlejuice is a tricky film, but this delightfully offbeat farce is one of Burton’s most enjoyable works, and a welcome return to his own brand of offbeat creepiness after the spectacular failure of Disney’s 2019 live-action Dumbo remake. Reuniting with old friends in front of and behind the camera, and including musical numbers, animated segments, and even a few pastiche of Italian cinema, it’s clear he was having a lot of fun making this, and audiences will enjoy it too.