“I swear, there is an afterlife So random,” Jenna Ortega’s angsty teenage character Astrid Dietz dives deep into Tim Burton’s action. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Meant as a toss-off line, one of them is “Well, K Done!” / “Oh, it is Gotta be sad!” direct statements to the audience that stand in for the actual jokes. Instead, it’s as if she’s saying the quiet part out loud, laying out a mission statement for the entire movie.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Basically a series of chaotic visual gags and halfhearted character micro-arcs, all strung together at random. It’s a showcase for Burton’s humor anarchy and love of comic caricature, a sequel built around callbacks and echoes of the original 1988 movie. It’s mostly just another tick mark Endless list of franchise installments of 2020 Which serves as a belated victory lap for past comic victories, while clarifying what was unique about those victories in the first place. But on its own, it’s not much of a movie. At best, it’s half a story – far more shocking than it was pure idiotic nonsense with no clear story.
The plot sounds like screenwriters (Smallville And Wednesday (co-writers Alfred Gough and Miles Miller) were on the first half of the project. The setup, at least, is filled with specific character details: Beetlejuice Protagonist Lydia Dietz (Winona Ryder) has become a famous TV ghost-chaser and secret off-screen pill-popper, inspired by her teenage experiences with Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), a “bio-exorcist” (ghost? or monster? this movie). Shocked. both say) who terrorized Lydia’s family in the first movie. She is estranged from her angsty teenage daughter Astrid, who feels Lydia spends too much time with her TV audience.
The space between them leaves room for three predators with their own agendas: Lydia’s oily manager Rory (Justin Theroux); local brooding boy Jeremy (Arthur Conti), whose doe-eyed Dostoevsky takes a romantic interest in Astrid; And of course Beetlejuice himself, who still longs to marry Lydia 30 years after their first meeting. All these men want something from the women in this story, and all three disguise that ambition as romance. It would be a clever parallel if the whole structure didn’t collapse immediately after setup.
There’s a faint flicker of emotion in the idea that Astrid and Lydia want each other’s love and attention, but they can’t find common ground, given Astrid’s strong suspicions about ghosts and Lydia’s determination to keep her daughter. Far from the world of the dead. The ways they both turn to other people and other pastimes to fill the holes in their lives might be poignant, if it weren’t all a ploy to pack the film with more clearly antagonistic characters—none of which Burton and the writers really are. Commit to more than one scene at a time.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Even with some legacy characters awkwardly shuffled off the stage, it’s a pretty over-the-top movie. Lydia’s mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) is still the central figure, but her husband Charles (Jeffrey Jones, whose career Ended with the child pornography scandal) conveniently dies in a comical accident, shown in stop-motion as a bid to keep the actor off-screen. And the original ghosts Adam and Barbara (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, who probably knew better than to take Burton’s phone call for this) “discovered a loophole,” evaded their orders to haunt Lydia’s house for the next 125 years, and disappeared. story
To fill their places, the sequel trots out a bunch of new faces, including Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson, a dead action-movie actor who treats his new afterlife-cop gig as just another hammy performance, and Monica Bellucci as Delores, a Stitches – together ghosts that want to devour Betelgeuse’s soul. As a visual design, Monica is a direct and simple amalgamation of Morticia Addams and Burton’s designs for Sally. The Nightmare Before Christmas. As the main villain of the movie, she is absolutely nothing – few poses, few visual effects and no sense of threat whatsoever. It is just another cold body with no inlet and outlet.
Therein lies the real problem Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — Dolores, Rory and Jeremy don’t get enough screen time or narrative space to be meaningful or memorable. No one does. The first half of the movie fades into a deluge of character trivia that doesn’t matter and never comes up again. None of the bits and bobs, like Astrid’s passion for climate change and political advocacy, or Delia’s latest giant art project, which uses her body as a canvas, have any theme or throughline.
A determined film-theorist might engage as the movie’s three generations of women try to regain control of their lives in a chaotic world – Astrid focusing on the environment, Lydia commoditizing and trivializing her distasteful association with the dead, Delia verbalizes her control over her own body. But none of these plot threads are important to the story or, beyond introductions, to the characters. Competing plot lines crowd and flatten each other. They eventually evolve into a shared composite medium to line up the cast for a rapid-fire tour of the afterlife, around which everyone runs as themselves. Pulling the Scooby-Doo door gagExcept for more half-baked puns.
And then there’s Keaton, resuming the role of Betelgeuse as if he never left it, and swanning his way through a movie that has no room for his larger-than-life performance. First Beetlejuice It gets much of its energy from the tonal conflict between Baldwin and Davis’ sweetly hapless, hopeless fish-out-of-water ghost characters and Keaton’s hilarious yet kid-friendly malice, with Ryder caught in the middle as a classic Burton morbid-goth. In the oddball sequel, that conflict makes no sense: the whole world has embraced the mischievous, obnoxious tone of Keaton’s character, and every player in this story feels like a thinly veiled version of the same person. There’s not a touch of sweetness in any of them, except maybe in a few moments when Astrid first meets Jeremy, and wonders if she’s finally found someone who understands her, as vague and broadly drawn as she is.
There’s a real sense that the screenwriters ran out of the building after putting together the first hour of the movie, leaving Burton to spend the rest of its run time saying, “Hey, remember that from the first movie?” References. Stop-motion sandworms are back. The afterlife-hell-bureaucracy coalition is back. The broad-shouldered, shrunken-headed corpse is back, and now there are lots of them. Betelgeuse is still pulling the behind-the-face-explosion routine to scare people. A children’s choir sings Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat (Day-O)” in a setting that makes no lick of sense as anything but a callback. Once again, a big lip-synced musical number is forced upon a bunch of reluctant participants. It’s the laziest possible way to put together a sequel: nostalgia with only a minimal new spin on anything, until a climax that’s hastily crossed out with a few old names and the end of the first movie with a few new names. Written in
At his best, Tim Burton always excelled at finding a hint of sincere emotion beneath his comic nonsense: Edward Scissorhands’ longing to fit safely and securely into a family, Jack Skellington’s pure joy in the new Christmas excitement, Ed. Wood’s authentic love of cinema and desire to create something beautiful and endearing. Burton’s characters stood out for their unpredictable, cheerfully terrifying quirks and ways of conveying a relatable sense of acceptance without the need to conform. But there is no sign of honesty anywhere in it Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceAnd there is no hint of related emotion. The entire film is an echo chamber full of events. As Astrid notes, it is So random.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Now in theaters.
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