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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice



Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Dark Comedy / English / 2024

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Out of morbid curiosity I saw this trailer:


And I thought, "Well shit, this looks legit as ****. Let's see it in theaters."


WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
At least 1 dog, and numerous other obviously computer generated animals.

Saw this movie in theaters again, which must be a theater-going record for me at this rate. Not much to comment on regarding the experience beyond the fact that the big screen makes even distant CGI very apparent and $26 is far too ****ing much.

I'm gonna refer to this movie as "B2", rather than the annoying over-syllabic title they gave it.

So B2, where to start? I think firstly and most importantly, I have to state that there are a lot of things working against this movie, in terms of my prospective appreciation for it. I was not a big fan of the original Beetlejuice, although it did have the charm that was expected from Tim Burton movies at the time, like Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands, both of which are movies I've rated very highly.

It's been a long time since I've seen the movie and now having seen the sequel it's apparent to me that I'm not really the target audience, in that it seems very interested in appealing to a new generation of teenage girls who many years ago would have been massive Winona Ryder stans.

To compound things even further, I have been VERY negative towards the last few Tim Burton movies I've seen. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one of the worst remakes I've ever seen, Sweeney Todd was overrated, and Alice in Wonderland was nothing like the American McGee adaptation I had so desperately wanted it to be.

Those are literally the last 3 Tim Burton directed features I've seen and my experience was so poor I've been completely turned off of anything he's been involved with since and have largely been of the opinion that Henry Selick deserves a lot of the credit Burton's received over the years.

However, when it comes to B2, despite my waning memory of the original movie, I have to admit it knocks it out of the park in one singular and not unimportant respect; and that's that it FEELS like a genuine follow-up to the original.

To clarify, I've at this point seen quite a few franchise resurrections, and too often they feel like completely different movies or games:

Mad Max: Fury Road is great, but it's a very different vibe than before,
2011's The Thing, while faithful, felt nothing like a John Carpenter movie,
and even Kingdom Hearts 3, a series that hadn't had a major installment in 14 years just clearly did not have the same design aspirations as Kingdom Hearts 2.

B2, in terms of capturing the experience of the original movie, puts all of these other series to shame. It's not just Tim Burton directing again, but they brought back Danny Elfman to score, and both Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton are reprising nearly 30-year-old roles as though no time has passed at all, AND the story is centered around a conflict that is natural and organic to the narrative that began in the first movie.

That is a PERFECT place to be in when your primary goal is to do justice to the original movie, which unfortunately, after so much time, really can't be taken for granted.

What franchise corpse shall we dig out of the grave today to shake a few dimes out of?

It helps B2's credibility as well that a sequel has been rumored for ages and it's just been in development hell for one reason or another.

Anyway, from the start, B2 is spot-on in terms of tone, it is 100% what anyone should expect from a Beetlejuice sequel and that alone I feel is extremely commendable, especially considering other returning performances like the one James Earl Jones turned in one of the increasingly innumerable and equally unwanted ****awful CGI Disney remakes...

I heard he died this week. That sucks.

To speak of B2 though, I'm gonna have to pull the ******* Card and end my positivity there. Please refer to the above as my crediting Burton's overall direction, Ryder and Keaton's portrayal and performances, and Elfman's involvement, but from here on I'm going to be more critical.



It makes a lot of sense from a narrative perspective that Ryder's daughter Astrid cuts against her mom in a lot of ways.

Ryder's role in Beetlejuice really came into popularity in a big way because she was a counter-cultural outcast, a goth, who was a totally independent female character, and ultimately presented as "desirable" in some charming way by a dangerous supernatural character, Beetlejuice.

That movie did Twilight better than Twilight did Twilight.

So in this movie, it's totally logical that, being enlightened to the existence of an actual afterlife, that Astrid, in a painfully New Age-y Artiste 2024, winds up as a huge skeptic of anything supernatural. She plays the Rebellious Counterculture Girl character in her own way and it works.

As I said, this feels like a natural extension of the plot from the previous movie, but I have some real issues with how they went about some, if not all, of the smaller arcs they weave in here.

For one, the overall irreverent tone towards "New Age" or progressive type crap initially comes off as adequately self-aware, the New Dad character is clearly intended to be deliberately obnoxious, and eventually killing off one of the other returning characters just for her to essentially ask to speak to the manager of the afterlife is of course intended to make fun of her personality.

This is all fine... up until you unironically, with nary a wink or comedic pause in the soundtrack, state that one of the characters has dressed up as a "feminist astrophysicist"... as though we, as the audience, or literally anyone in-universe, is supposed to recognize that from a generic dress.

We are also expected to believe that two completely random teenagers happen to meet each other by chance, and both have read and can quote Dostoevsky. No. That's not a thing. Shut the **** up.

It's especially painful when the reference is used to aggressively reaffirm Astrid's already well-telegraphed worldview and to dovetail into a BRUTALLY CRINGE Overnight Romance with this random neighbor boy.

I appreciate that his role is subverted into revealing that he's actually a ghost and a murderer, ultimately exposing Astrid to the supernatural while providing a sufficient justification for Ryder to reluctantly recruit Beetlejuice's help... and Beetlejuice is a great character for that purpose.

But that's like... at least 50 minutes into the movie. Once Astrid gets pulled into the underworld, the movie becomes the scenery-chewing clownworld Keaton fest it was meant to be, but before that, the cringe is unreal.

Apart from that, at least two character-centric subplots get a ton of build up for an absolutely dismal payoff.

One such subplot involves Beetlejuice's "ex-wife" which is a cute idea on paper; she's hunting him down over the course of the movie and it serves as motivation for Beetlejuice to cooperate with Ryder and make him a bit more sympathetic... however when she finally finds Beetlejuice, she just gets eaten by a sandworm on the spot.

So that's cool.

Similarly, a lot of time is spent agonizing over Astrid's dad who had a kid with Ryder and died offscreen, yet mysteriously he's never appeared to Ryder in her visions. What happened? Is he truly dead? Is he tied up with Beetlejuice somehow? Some other elaborate explanation?

No, he's just some dude working in the afterlife because reasons. He exists to save Astrid once, fails to deliver any sort of emotional reunion, and then immediately returns to being a background character. What an underwhelming non-payoff for someone we've referenced so many times since the start of the movie.

Orlando Bloom's character finding his dad enslaved to Davy Jones in Dead Man's Chest was SO MUCH BETTER and they didn't even really do all that much with him.

You'd also think a reunion like this would meaningfully restore the relationship between Astrid and her mom, who she's had so much venom for up until this point in the movie... but no, they just hug it out.

It really isn't that Ryder and Keaton are just so ****IN' AWESOME that they put all the other actors' performances to shame or anything, these two side characters are given a massive amount of attention throughout the movie and they really just amount to piss all by the end of things.

Willem Dafoe gets a similar treatment as an afterlife actor/police investigator. He gets a bunch of screentime so they can contrive a reason for him to also go after Beetlejuice, but then they are entirely sidelined at the climax of the movie. Dafoe's character was so crowbarred into this movie that his absence would cost it nothing, and that sucks because I like Willem Dafoe.

What is debateably an even bigger slap in the face is how they resolve Juice and Ryder's marriage, which he ropes her into agreeing to contractually.

Astrid literally just says, "Hang on, I just read this book and it says your contract is bullshit" and the contract just bursts into flames. What a COMPLETE Deus Ex Machina copout. She could be lying for all of what the audience sees, but that's played completely straight, which is especially frustrating because this is the second and longer of two sequences in which Beetlejuice is "comedically" dubbed over for a ****ing song that overstays it's welcome.

Dude's got the entire cast singing about a giant cake and they reuse this effect that pours green slime down the sides of this cake multiple times, as though they didn't have a shot of the whole cake getting drenched and by the time you notice lines getting repeated, the movie basically ends, and all of the conflict is laughably resolved.

And I use "laughably" generously because despite being a comedy I think this movie got a single solitary chuckle out of me, and that was just over some throwaway line where Ryder walks into a shot huffing up a storm and another character says it sounded like she about to be attacked by a moose.

As I said, this movie wasn't really made for me, but at the same time, what a tremendous waste of multiple characters and subplots. It also sucks that basically all of the best gags were wasted on the trailer I saw above.

Classic example of a trailer delivering a better overall experience than the actual movie.

If the movie wasn't a comedy and I was intended to be significantly more invested into the story and characters than I was, then I'd have rated this much more harshly, but as it is, I think I'd be well within my right to have expected far far worse than what we got.


Final Verdict:
[Okay]