Stumbling out of the gate, Tim Burton’s long-awaited Beetlejuice,
Beetlejuice eventually rights itself and delivers the unique brand of
horrific dark humor fans of the previously film embrace. However, it’s a bit of
a clumsy, overly long haul before we get to the inspired hijinks that carry the
third act. Cluttered with extraneous characters and incidents, the screenplay
by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar spends far too much time setting up a
needlessly complicated story involving a resurrected lover out for revenge, a
deceased actor with an identity crisis, multiple characters with self-esteem
issues and loads of familial dysfunction.
You’ll noticed I didn’t mention psychedelic afterlife shenanigans
and a famous bio-exorcist with wonderfully groan-inducing one-liners. There’s
far too little of what made the 1988 feature a cult classic in the sequel’s
first hour and it suffers for it. Yet, patience is finally rewarded when
Burton’s uniquely macabre pieces all come together, the film’s conclusion
everything fans have been craving.
Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) has found a use for her unique
ability of being able to see dead people. The host of a “reality” television
show dealing with haunted houses, she gotten used to seeing souls caught in
limbo. However, when she begins to catch
glimpses of her old nemesis, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), she knows something
is amiss. And when her father dies – in spectacularly gruesome fashion – she’s
forced to deal with her eccentric stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara).
Insisting they return to Winter River and the creepy home they once lived in,
the duo heads out with Rory (Justin Theroux), Lydia’s opportunistic television
producer, and Astrid (Jenna Ortega), her resentful daughter, in tow.
Meanwhile, an accident in the afterlife has reanimated
Delores (Monica Bellucci), a soul-sucking entity who was once the titular
character’s wife. Seems he did her wrong – I’ll leave it to you, dear viewer, to
discover just what occurred – and she’s out to make her ex suffer…eternally.
Leaving soul-depleted corpses in her wake, paranormal detective Wolf Jackson
(Willem Dafoe) has been assigned to see who’s killing the already-dead.
Beetlejuice finds Delores is on the hunt and is suddenly on the run.
As I said, there’s a great deal going on here - too much, actually. While it’s always a delight to see Bellucci and a sequence in which
Delores literally staples herself back together is a highlight, her presence,
as well as that of Dafoe’s Jackson, are for the most part superfluous. That
their story is referred to so infrequently bears this out, and while these
moments bog down the story, Dafoe’s over-the-top performance as a dead actor
who’s convinced he’s actually a cop, albeit a dead one, is a hoot. (The Mario
Bava-inspired flashback is a keeper as well.)
Had this storyline been excised, perhaps the rest of the
film wouldn’t have seemed so ponderous. Far too many expository scenes are used
early on to reestablish Lydia and Delia’s relationship as well as the divide
between Astrid and her mother. These moments are done with little flair, their
obligatory nature obvious, the cast and Burton simply going through the
motions. Keaton is surprisingly stiff in the early going, his manic approach
notably absent.
Thankfully, things right themselves once the trio of Deetz
women find themselves in Beetlejuice’s domain. Burton and his production
designer Mark Scruton don’t disappoint, delivering an expanded afterlife
environment that takes the original film’s macabre chic aesthetic to
wonderfully perverse extremes, the aptly named transport, “The Soul Train,” a
highlight.
Not only do the visuals shift in the third act but the pace
quickens, and Keaton finds his footing, firing off one gleefully inappropriate
joke after another. A wedding scene using Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park is
employed to mirror the famous Banana Boat Song sequence from the first
movie. Though a bit long, it works, the requisite cake melting in spectacular
neon fashion.
Whether this follow-up has the shelf life of its predecessor
remains to be seen. However, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice will likely prove
just good enough to satisfy the Burton disciples, his vision still a
distinctive one amidst the CGI-cluttered features that litter today’s cinematic
landscape.
