'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' Is a Straight-Up Goofball Paradise

By Jason Adams | Film | September 6, 2024 |

By Jason Adams | Film | September 6, 2024 |

Don’t say his name three times—at least not yet since we have to see how this one does first, financially speaking. So just say it twice as you say hello to your old pal Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (née Betelgeuse Betelgeuse), the thirty-six years in the making sequel to Tim Burton’s now classic absurdist paranormal comedy. And please do excuse me while I take two seconds to vacuum up the pile of dust I just spontaneously burst into upon writing the words “thirty-six years.” Good grief, we’re old. But if Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is any indicator, somewhere underneath all of that, we’re still spry, silly, lively, little “ghosts with the most,” because I’m happy (née ecstatic) to say that while Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s bones may creak and ache and pop out of place here and there, our beautiful baby in the black-and-white stripes has still got it. Simply put, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice rules. Consider the juice re-loosed, y’all.

Catching up with Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder, beloved Gen X queen) here now in middle age might have been a monumental task for Tim Burton & Co. to achieve off-screen, but once Danny Elfman’s immortal theme song kicks in (revamped ever so slightly for this brand new and extra ghoulish millennium) and we find ourselves floating high above the streets and wooden bridges of Winter River, Connecticut, why it’s like no time has passed at all. It was like lacing up my favorite old goth corset and gloves—so familiar, so comfortable, so right.

A little side-arc of personal history here, just to make it clear upfront that my relationship with the Beetlejuice world is deeply legit—we all have those movies that follow us through our lives like yipping little ghost dogs with bright red blinking noses. Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice has been one of those for me, big time. Beetlejuice was the very first movie my parents allowed me to go to the movie theater and see all by myself in 1988, at the tender and deeply impressionable age of 10. And I was, to put it mildly, immediately smitten. Essential to not just my brief goth phase and to my eternally pitch-black sense of humor but also to the very spark of my obsession with the beautifully weird possibilities of the big screen itself, Beetlejuice led me right to where I stand before you today, reviewing these damn movie things. (Or running off into fanciful flights of personal digressions whilst supposedly reviewing them, anyway.)

Secondly (but not terribly behind import-wise)—when I was first bursting my way out of the closet in college, being all here and queer and whatnot, Beetlejuice played a role in that too. A strange and inexplicable one, yes, but would this strange and inexplicable movie have it any other way? Beetlejuice works in mysterious (very mysterious) ways. And the gay club where I first went out every weekend dancing and … well you know, whatnot … for some reason they introduced their weekly drag show with Elfman’s aforementioned “Main Titles” theme. So now whenever I hear that incredible music (to be honest probably my favorite piece of film music that there is) I associate it with coming out. Be gay, Be Tlejuice, baby. And yes admittedly that’s almost a “The Babadook is now a gay icon” level of Dada-esque randomness, but it’s one that makes me feel warm and fuzzy all the same.

That said, it’s not like Tim Burton’s movies, as hetero as the man himself appears to be, aren’t queer down to their very marrow. The man’s world is not built with straight lines, no matter how much leering at cleavage his camera might do. His first movie, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, helped to make an icon of perhaps the queerest kid’s star of them all—a man-child who always found an excuse to run away from the cute girl who liked him so he could go rassle in the bath with another boy and don drag to be the Bonnie to a hunky prison-escapee.

And much like Pee-wee, Lydia Deetz remains even here in middle age impossible to pin down. Sure, there are still those weird little repressed bursts of hormonal energy popping about in 2024 Beetlejuice-ville—Winona, now 52-years-gorgeous, does indeed get to rock some Elvira-adjacent décolleté in Colleen Atwood’s updated costumes that makes it clear our Lydia’s a whole damn adult now, thank you very much. But Burton—and I think I shock no one who has seen Batman Returns by saying this—likes his sex a little perverse. Lydia might be a grown-up—heck Lydia might even be a mother now, but like that scene in Bram Stoker’s Dracula where Dracula is all made out of rats piled up in person form, Lydia is above all a nesting doll of subjugated anxieties. Winona is and forever will be our queen of relatable shit!

So when we reunite with dearest Lydia, we find her thickly embroiled in a toxic codependent relationship with a dude named Rory (Justin Theroux), who we know right off the bat is a sleazeball because, well, his name is Rory in a Tim Burton movie. That’s just math. But his tight little ponytail and the prissy grin plastered across Theroux’s face at all times are also waving their own big red flags— a whole skeleton town Halloween parade’s worth of them. Lydia’s too hopped up on the goofballs that help her tamp down on her paranormal abilities to notice, though—it turns out that seeing dead people on the regular can put a person on edge, as if we didn’t already know that from watching Mischa Barton puke green gunk for Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense.

Everybody in Lydia’s orbit can tell that Rory’s a total Rory, though—Lydia’s legendary stepmother slash art-world goddess Delia (the legendary goddess Catherine O’Hara) squeals and runs away from his touch, and the acidic glares coming off Lydia’s Lydia-esque daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, fitting right in) would melt the face off an even slightly less oblivious jerk. But it’s clear pretty quickly that coming to this conclusion and finding her way back to her spectacular self will be our dear Lydia’s arc here in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. And it turns out that there’s a dude named twice right there in the movie’s title who might be able to help her find her way home again.

If you’re at all familiar with the Beetlejuice cartoon that aired for four seasons on Saturday mornings starting in 1989 (which P.S. just dropped in full onto Tubi), I wouldn’t blame you if this somewhat neutered relationship-to-be between Lydia and Mr. Juice makes you think of that show, where the two were suddenly friends who went on adventures in the afterlife slash underworld together—Beetlejuice Beetlejuice often feels like an extended big-budget live-action episode of that series. This, mind you, is not a complaint! The film threads the needle between that and their filmic antagonism and it strikes a pretty perfect balance.

One that, most importantly, gets the hell out of Michael Keaton’s way to let him do as he needs to do—namely, chew all of the spectacularly production-designed scenery down, then barf it up right back up and then slick down his fright wig with whatever remnants might’ve lasted the trip. Basically, he seems happy as a dog that’s been crowned king of Alpo Mountain to be back here playing this iconic role again, and the crazy bastard eats it right up. That’s the thing about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—it’s exceptionally and infectiously clear that everybody who worked on the first movie is deeply and profoundly happy to be back in this world again, and that everybody who wasn’t in the first movie is deeply and profoundly happy to be getting the chance to be in this world now. On that note say hello to Willem Dafoe, who’s having a hammy blast playing a dead actor turned police detective with half his brains exposed.

You can always tell when people are doing these reboots for the mortgage payments, and there’s not a whiff of that evident here. Even if I didn’t know, nerd that I am, that Winona had it written into her Stranger Things contract since day one of that show that they would have to work their schedule around a Beetlejuice sequel if and when one should film, it’s clear in every frame that she too is pleased as punch to slip back under Lydia’s jack-o-lantern bangs.

And that energy bouncing off everybody (including Burton and his team behind the camera) often saves the film from its admittedly meandering and over-stuffed plot. Because everybody gets stuff to do, dammit, sometimes to momentum’s detriment. For one, Beetlejuice himself now has an ex-wife named Delores (Monica Belluci, bringing a heft of that nude perversity I previously alluded to), a literal soul-sucker who’s escaped the prison he long ago put her in and is out raging on the “murder Beetlejuice and anybody who gets in her way” war-path. Does all of that amount to much besides an incredible scene of Belluci stapling her body together to a disco ditty and then swanning around the hallways of the afterlife with a wind machine making her look super cool as she does it? No, it does not. And still, I never once cared. Belluci? Having a blast. How could I not, too?

As for Astrid, she also has her own warped love story in the making—making cute with a too-normal-to-be-true neighborhood boy Jeremy (Arthur Conti) produces its fair share of headaches for her and everybody. If you can’t spy something’s off the first time the film half-shows his parents (big Coraline vibes) then you’re just not paying attention. Obvious? Of course. Delightful? Doubly so. Ortega had already fully won me over circa-X, and yet she goes above and beyond, proving herself to be an ace fit into the Deetz clan and the Wednesday-adjacent Beetlejuice-verse. And every moment her behavior gives Delia the chance to told-you-so side-eye Lydia about the dangers of raising sardonic children is deliciousness distilled to its darkest, funniest essence.

Clearly, I could go on and on, but let’s leave some of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s wildly wackadoo particulars to y’all to discover for yourselves. It certainly doesn’t reinvent the sandworm, and there are plenty of gratuitous callbacks to the original of the sort that have irritated me during other recent franchise reboots (why yes, I am looking at you, Alien Romulus) but none of them here cross the line. The original film was already a flimsy plot excuse for Burton to hang all of his goth weirdnesses upon anyway, with all manner of fourth-wall-breaking winkery—this sequel just carries on that seriously unserious tradition into straight-up goofball paradise. And it does so with such great humor that it doesn’t make me feel dirty about my lifetime bond with the original. That they made this magic happen without de-aging Alec Baldwin or CG resurrecting a single Sylvia Sidney—truly what more could you ask? Thank all the sands of Saturn, it’s a double-dipper that don’t stink.