After 36 years, the juice is back. Director Tim Burton finally resurrects his hit ghost story which cemented Michael Keaton as a bona fide leading man and launched him into Burton’s early Batman suit. The 1988 film won an Academy Award for best make-up and propelled new actress Winona Ryder into teenage super-stardom.
In the original film, Beetlejuice is a demon who inhabits a bureaucratic waiting room for the newly deceased awaiting transfer to their final resting place. Two such recently deceased ghosts must remain in their earthly home for 125 years before attempting further transfer. The problem is a new couple, the Deetz’s, have already bought the ghosts’ home and started a horrific remodel led by the wife who promotes herself as a conceptual artist. The ghosts summon Beetlejuice to scare the new family off.
The couple’s estranged daughter, Lydia, played by Ryder, is the only one who can see the ghosts who increasingly take more interest in Lydia than her parents. When a séance gone wrong threatens the afterlives of the ghosts, Lydia cuts a deal with Beetlejuice to save them in exchange for agreeing to marry him, which allows him return to mortality. Beetlejuice saves the ghosts, but the ghosts save Lydia from Beetlejuice’s wedding, and he is imprisoned back in the afterlife waiting room.
Fast forward nearly 40 years, and the new film starts with Beetlejuice still stuck in the bureaucratic afterlife. Lydia is recently widowed and has her own television talk show on the supernatural, directed by her opportunistic boyfriend Rory. In a role reversal, Lydia struggles to connect with her estranged daughter Astrid, played by Jenna Ortega.
An unexpected death in the family sends Lydia and Astrid back to Lydia’s parent’s now abandoned ghost house. When Astrid inadvertently enters the ghostly afterlife waiting station, Lydia has no choice but to summon Beetlejuice for help. Still smitten with Lydia, Beetlejuice again conditions his assistance upon her marriage.
Director Tim Burton once more delivers off-beat jokes dispersed within a version of the afterlife only Burton could recreate - a version of hell somewhere between ER and DMV waiting rooms. Michael Keaton proves he is up to the task with a stellar repeat performance and Winona Ryder nuances her updated role bridging her ghostly neurosis with new insecurities as a mom.
However, the rest of the cast falls a little flat. Jenna Ortega looks the part but fails to inspire the same audience empathy Ryder achieved in the first film. Catherine O’Hara and newcomers Willem Dafoe and Monica Bellucci do their best to pick up the slack in supporting roles, but their overly dramatic side acts are unnecessarily stretched to compensate for lack of a main event in this Burton circus.
So, on my Black Diamond ski trail rating system, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” earns my intermediate blue ski trail rating. Fans of the original film will enjoy a clever plot twist and the nostalgic follow-up which maintains the authenticity and morbid humor of the first.
Unfortunately, several new faces are miscast and fail to deliver the chemistry that Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin achieved as the original ghosts.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is playing in theaters with a runtime of one hour and 44 minutes, and the film is rated PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, language and a ghoulish riff on “What about Bob?”
