More a cult classic than a full-blown masterpiece, the original 1988 Beetlejuice is fondly remembered for a few key reasons: the extraordinary ants-in-his-pants live-action cartoon-character performance that was Michael Keaton in the title role; the crowning of a teenage goth queen in Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz; and the true establishment — in only his second film — of the spooky filmmaking force that is Timothy Walter Burton, a director so distinctive that his mere name announces a certain freaky style and stance.
The ingeniously named Beetlejuice Beetlejuice sees the director get back to his roots. Right from the ghostly title sequence and Danny Elfman score, the camera once again swooping over the sleepy New England town of Winter River, Connecticut, you know exactly where all this is going. As before, it’s anchored by Lydia, now a “psychic mediator” on a paranormal reality TV show called ‘Ghost House’ and dating slimy TV producer Rory (Justin Theroux). But the black-and-white-striped miscreant ghoul known as Betelgeuse haunts her dreams, and soon she’s getting a strong sense of déjà vu.
Michael Keaton seems to have more energy than he did 35 years ago.
We as the audience do feel that too to some extent — there is one nostalgia-chasing famous line-reading from Michael Keaton, if not quite as egregious as the one they made him say in The Flash — but it’s credit to Burton that he’s trying to carve a relatively fresh story here. The only problem is its moving parts: the script spends so much time introducing new characters and plot-threads that it gets a bit tangled in the narrative cobwebs.
There’s teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, inheritor of Ryder’s goth-queen crown). There’s Jeremy (Arthur Conti), the cute boy she literally stumbles upon in Winter River. There’s Monica Bellucci’s Delores, Betelgeuse’s ex-from-hell, who enjoys a brilliant limb-by-limb introduction but not much else. There’s Willem Dafoe’s Wolf Jackson, a former TV actor-turned-afterlife cop who hams it up so gloriously, you want more. All of them are fun enough, but feel underserved in a tight runtime.
Luckily, the film has a secret weapon. As soon as the Juice is loose, it all starts to make sense. Michael Keaton, barely ageing a day in his panda-eyed demonic get-up, if anything seems to have more energy than he did 35 years ago, bouncing off the purgatorial walls with hilarious gusto, lifting everything around him.
The film is strongest when it remembers it’s a Tim Burton film and has licence to get weird. While it’s slicker and less homemade-feeling than the 1988 vintage, there are still flashes of B-movie brilliance: a stop-motion animation sequence, some delightful shrunken-head prosthetic effects, and two demented birth scenes with the most ghoulish prosthetic baby this side of American Sniper. It’s moments like this, when Burton lets his freak flag truly fly, that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice earns its stripes.
