Beetlejuice Beetlejuice starts off with a competent lurch, but loses it's limbs by the end

It's time to move on.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice takes place 30 years after the events of the first film. Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) hosts a popular ghost-hunting show with her boyfriend and producer Rory (Justin Theroux). Lydia's stepmother (Catherine O'Hara), now an avant-garde art show host in Soho, shares the news with Lydia about the passing of her father, Charles. On their way back to their old home in Winter River to host a funeral service for Charles' passing, they pick up Lydia's daughter, Astrid (Jenny Ortega), who has a strained and distant relationship with Lydia from boarding school. All the while, Lydia has constant recurring visions of Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton).

At the start, the film presents to you its main conflict: Astrid doesn't respect Lydia. Astrid believes that Lydia has become a sellout due to her using her ghost-sight powers for financial gain via her TV show. Astrid also believes that Lydia lacks the ability to see ghosts at all due to the fact that Lydia can never see the ghosts of the people who Astrid cares about; those being her grandfather, Charles, and her father, Richard (Santiago Cabrera). Nor the ghosts of former owners of the house in Winter River, Barbara and Adam, who, according to Lydia, have since “moved on” from the afterlife. 

“That's convenient,” says Astrid to Lydia in one scene. I agree. I recall in the first film the central conflict revolved around the fact that Barbara and Adam had to remain in the house for 125 years. Not 30 years. The film needs an excuse to explain away the fact that the two main stars of the first film weren't in this sequel. It’s a little messy and contrived, but it works, I guess. Whatever.

Meanwhile, in the afterlife, Betelgeuse is still working his “bio-exorcist” job. I don't know how that makes a ton of sense, considering how dangerous he was in the first movie. One would assume the bureaucratic afterlife would hold a tighter leash on such an unpredictable guy. You can clearly tell the film needed to manufacture an excuse for him to still be around rather than dooming him to eternal damnation. Again, whatever, it works, I guess. I'm willing to overlook and not read too much into details like this when you're dealing with a film that revels in slapstick silliness.

However, therein lies the exact, fundamental problem with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: the film is crawling with these types of handy explanations that make little sense. A movie trying to fit a round peg in a square hole; it fits, but it's clearly not the right shape. 

Betelgeuse's life gets complicated when a mysterious woman, Delores (Monica Bellucci), later revealed to be his ex-wife and murderer during his time among the living, reappears in the afterlife seeking her revenge on him for murdering her many hundreds of years ago. Bellucci's character stalks him throughout the afterlife seeking him out and sucking the souls of those unfortunate enough to cross her path, but that's about all she amounts to in the film. Her backstory is that she's a witch who fatally poisoned Betelgeuse during the era of the Black Death centuries ago. In revenge, he ended her life with an ax. Yet again, this really doesn't make much sense when you spend even a few seconds thinking about it. She's been dead for hundreds of years, and she just now decided to take revenge on Betelgeuse. The only thing stopping her from doing so was the fact that her body parts were trapped in various storage containers? Only to have a careless afterlife janitor, surprisingly portrayed by Danny DeVito, set the events in motion by breaking open the containers? 

Maybe I'm being too nitpicky about these details, but it strikes me as a very weak way of creating an antagonist. The ultimate climax of the movie is when she confronts Betelgeuse, and it ends with her getting eaten by a sandworm within 5 minutes of her showing up.  She hardly has any lines and serves more as a weak B-plot distraction than the antagonist she was intended to be. 

Another example of the way Beetlejuice Beetlejuice bloats itself storywise is through the subplot of Astrid meeting Jeremy, A seemingly normal teenager who reveals that he's actually a ghost seeking to be resurrected in the mortal world and can help Astrid be reunited with her late father if she helps him. When Jeremy double crosses Astrid, trapping her in the afterlife and seeking to switch places with her, Lydia seeks out the help of Betelgeuse to save her.

This actually had a decent amount of meat on it, and I'm surprised that the movie didn't focus on this as the central conflict more than the Delores subplot. Instead, the film throws it there haphazardly and rushes through the resolution of this struggle without any time to digest it. How? Lydia and Astrid are reunited with Richard, who rescues them both and helps them get back to the mortal realm. What of Jeremy, you ask? Betelgeuse sends him to hell. That's it. That's the way they get rid of Jeremy. In all, this eats up a good 10-15 minutes. 

By the third act, you really start noticing how much they're rushing through everything, trying to squeeze all these elements and resolve them in the 104 minutes they gave themselves. I have not read anything about the production of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, so I don't know if the runtime was a limit imposed on the filmmakers due to contractual or budget limitations or if it's simply what they decided was good enough. Either way, it suffers greatly from it.

Seeing Winona Ryder in anything is always a treat. She's a fantastic actress with decades of experience under her belt. I just wish Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a better vehicle for her to shine through. Her portrayal as the now older Lydia, an estranged mom and grieving widow, doesn't fit. For one, why does Lydia have any kind of grief or trauma associated with the loss of her husband? She knows full well that in the world that she lives in, death isn't the end of the story. She knows for a fact that ghosts are real! So what is the issue? I could understand the inherent sadness of not being able to contact a loved one from the afterlife, but I'm not sure why she needs to go to therapy for it.

Secondly, the whole ghost-hunting TV show angle feels incredibly lame for her character. In the 1988 film, she was portrayed as a jaded, creative, goth girl obsessed with the supernatural with a much better head on her shoulders than the adults who surrounded her. Are we really supposed to believe that Lydia would go on to create reality TV show garbage? I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. If anything, I expected her to somewhat grow out of the goth personality with age but retain her wit, sense of humor, and misanthropic charm. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that making Lydia a mom was not the best decision either, as I feel this really hampers her character. 

Jenny Ortega does a good enough job as her daughter Astrid, but like Ryder, I found myself wishing she had a better character to play. She is angry at her mom for spending too much time focused on her TV career and constantly rolling her eyes at the idea that ghosts are real. For much of the movie, I felt like the ire Astrid had towards her mom was like watching 1988 Lydia scold present-day Lydia. Similar to Lydia in the 1988 film, Astrid wishes she had someone around who she could relate with. Astrid is no goth like her mother, preferring the more intellectual route, and instead finds solace with Jeremy, whom she discovers is also a Dostoevsky-head like she is. Unfortunately for Ortega, her character's plot line gets completely lost in the sauce, and once it's resolved, there isn't much left for her to do other than engage in the film's silliness.

Michael Keaton is the biggest standout in the whole ghoulish affair. A legendary actor in his own right, Keaton still knows how to play Betelgeuse as great as he did back in the 80s. The delivery of his lines and physical antics made me genuinely laugh. Perhaps it's the nostalgia talking, but I can't help but be charmed by the man. He's still got it. My only criticism here is that I wish the movie would have let us spend more time with his character. By the midway point, my brain was getting so tired trying to make sense of the swollen plot that I found myself wishing they could get back to Keaton already. Bring me my court jester! I want to clap my hands in glee like the bloated seal that I am at the Funny Man Doing Funny Things!

It is a shame that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has so many flaws because I genuinely find this movie funny. On top of Keaton's performances, there are a lot of visual gags, as well as an enjoyable performance by Willem Dafoe as a former action movie star and now ghost detective in the afterlife, whom I also would have loved to have seen more of, and that once again the film squanders the potential of. 

I wanted to like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice more than I did, but the film kept on asking me to ignore a crowded story, character inconsistencies, and convenient excuses so that I wouldn't notice how poorly it stapled itself together. If it had spent more time distracting me with the comedy than leaning so heavily on the characters, it might have worked. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a terrible movie. The story is fine enough, but like the concept of death itself, it's best not to dwell on it too much.