Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Review
Suitably zany, but remarkably overcrowded, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a good bit of late-80’s fun stuffed full with Netflix-level teenage angst.
After a family tragedy, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) returns to the Deetz family home in Winter River with her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and step-mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara). When Astrid accidentally opens a portal to the afterlife, Beetlejuice returns to unleash his own brand of mayhem.
This sequel to the iconic original starts out with a lot of the same zany energy, and it’s extremely welcome. We loved the practical elements; the flyover of the model, the great set design in the afterlife, the costuming. All of it combined to make this movie feel like a product of a different time, when movies didn’t all feel the same - when the sheen was a little less lustrous, but a lot more lovable.
Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and, in particular, Michael Keaton, all help that along a lot. They are all wonderful to behold, in particular O’Hara and Keaton whose energy here is off the charts. It’s a wonderful return to form, and fantastic to see them all back together again.
Unfortunately, it’s in the new elements that the film is let down. Jenna Ortega and her subplot frankly don’t hit at all. The love story turned traitorous encounter feels like a Netflix teen soap, and just doesn’t fit with the tone of the other elements of the story. Justin Theroux’s dastardly partner to Lydia also feels grating and unfleshed out, which means his eventual comeuppance just never brings the reward it should. Monica Belluci, while opening with a fantastic sequence stitching her severed body parts back together, spends the rest of the film ominously walking through corridors, only to be done away with in the end with no real fanfare. A complete waste.
The whole film is overstuffed to the point of unbearability. There are too many storylines here, and none of them fleshed out nearly enough.
What that means is that when the movie is fun - and it frequently is fun - it’s a blast, but for too short a time. And when it moves away from that, we get long stretches of boring teen drama or haunted corridor walking or thinly veiled emotional abuse, and that is all coupled with a range of plot elements and threads that are forgotten about, ignored or explained so rapidly and poorly as to be unintelligible.
The saving grace of this movie is the set design, costuming, and older elements. There’s something lovely about the vibe of it all, and Keaton and O’Hara deliver blindingly fun performances that keep you engaged, even after trudging through the rest.
