“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” would have been better dead

The first Beetlejuice The film, released in 1988, is artistic and simple at the same time. Tim BurtonThe visual world of is busy and hectic, a riot of sideways humor and cartoonish gore that, along with the 1990s Edward Scissorhandsdefined the director's style early in his career. But the story behind all that weird architecture isn't that complex. It's mostly about two people realizing they've died and learning how to become a ghost. It's a film of discovery, a satisfying explanation of the best and worst practices in the afterlife.

That makes Beetlejuice a difficult candidate for a sequel. How do you convincingly teach an audience what they have already learned and what they still remember fondly? Perhaps that is why it took Burton and his team 35 years to develop a sequel. And yet, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice suggests that almost four decades were not quite long enough.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuicewhich premiered here on Wednesday at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, is a rat's nest of flashbacks and plot so jumbled and cluttered that it's almost abstract. It's another sequel that serves as a sad testament to the ingenuity of the original film.

When Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is not a desperate imitation of what worked in the original, but manically introduces new characters and premises. Roughly speaking, the film is about the adult Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) tries to reconcile with her estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Lydia, a widow, has used her ability to communicate with the dead to become the host of a popular ghost-hunting television series, a job that doesn't really suit the jaded, dour loner we met in 1988. But people change, and so Lydia is now an easy-to-get traitor whose daughter thinks she's an imposter. It's a depressing re-entry into the franchise, a grim assertion that adulthood will flatten and diminish personality.

Mother and child are pulled back and forth by the film's many storylines – depending on the minute, there's a death in the family, an upcoming wedding, a case of crushes and the angry, soul-sucking (literally) ex-wife of the titular ghoul. Burton keeps our heads spinning at breakneck speed, jumping erratically between storylines that never really converge. At one point in the film, Astrid asks her mother what happened to the ghosts Lydia knew as a teenager: the ones that were so winningly spoken of by Alec Baldwin And Geena Davis. Lydia hastily says that they found a gap and moved on to the next plane, and Astrid almost turns to the camera to say, “How convenient.”

This suggests that the film is aware that cheap narrative fixes are annoying, but uses them forcefully anyway. Problems are solved with a snap of the fingers or sudden digressions from internal logic. Monica Bellucci's Delores, the murderous former wife of Beetlejuice (Michael Keatonof course), is supposedly even more evil than Mr. Juice and is introduced in the film as a looming storm – what will she do when she finally gets her revenge? She then stalks the edges of the film until Burton abruptly decides he's done with her. The same goes for Astrid's romantic interlude, a plot full of potential that is hastily sketched out and resolved.

Keaton, for his part, still remembers how to play the title character, although I wish someone had jazzed up his remarks and one-liners a bit. Ryder is baffled by Lydia's new gentleness, while Ortega has to play a less dynamic, moody teenager than the one she plays. Wednesday (also produced by Burton). Willem Dafoe hardly perceived as a dead TV policeman who works in the afterlife as a real investigator (or something like that), while the great Catherine O’Harawhile Lydia's carefree stepmother and artist Delia tries to make something special out of this superficial revisit.

With his lame humor, his rehearsed emotions and his exaggerated efforts to disgust us, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a waste of a good cast and a tarnishing of the legacy of a classic film. What's most annoying is that this film was voluntarily called out by people who should know better than to change something that was long since peacefully laid to rest.