Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Tim Burton

Starring:  Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara, Monica Belluci, Willem Dafoe, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Arthur Conti

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has too many characters, too many subplots, and is an overstuffed, bloated movie even at 100 minutes.   It's the sequel no one asked for, but here it is anyway in all its glory.  

I saw the original film only once when it was released in 1988.  I wasn't much thrilled by it and I haven't seen it since.  Fortunately, the sequel doesn't require a revisit to the original.  Michael Keaton returns to the title role as a devious ghost exorcist who is both friend and foe to Lydia Deetz (Ryder), who now hosts a television show about ghosts.  She receives word from her artist stepmother (O' Hara) that her father was killed by a shark following a plane crash.  The father wanders around the underworld with the top half of his body missing.  

Meanwhile, Lydia is being romanced and proposed to by her oily, sneaky producer/manager (Theroux), who clearly has a bigger agenda.  Lydia's daughter Astrid (Ortega) resents her mother, but comes home from college following her father's passing.  She and Lydia have a Past to contend with, but not so much that Astrid doesn't begin a potential romance with a good-looking young man who hangs out in a tree fort.  

Beetlejuice, meanwhile, has to avoid his ex-wife Delores (Bellucci), who somehow has returned from another afterlife, I suppose, and has designs on revenge.  Beetlejuice tells his story of how Delores came to be his ex-wife and how he wound up a ghost.   There are long stretches where we forget she's even in the movie.  Other unnecessary characters like Willem Dafoe's Wolf Jackson, an afterlife detective who was an actor when he was alive.  We wait for his arc to develop and it never does.  

Beetlejuice himself is a mystery.  He's a hero one moment and a villain the next.  We can't keep track of him.  It's telling that the character everyone loves the most is Bob, the guy with the shrunken head and bulging eyes who can't speak and meets a terrible end at the hands of Delores.  Bob doesn't deserve that ending.  What we're left with is a movie with people we don't care about carrying about subplots we have no interest in.  I'd love to know more about Bob, though.  Maybe he can get his own movie.