Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Review: Tim Burton's Delightful Sequel Brings Back the Magic

Hollywood has a history of resurrecting the decaying corpses of long-dead films with belated sequels, so it was only a matter of time before someone dug into the tomb marked Beetlejuice. That someone was always going to be Tim Burton, the director of the original 1988 film, and despite rumors that a Beetlejuice sequel was in the works for decades, Burton insisted that he would only consider it if Michael Keaton reprised the title role and any sequel remained true to the spirit of the morbidly eccentric original film. On both criteria, Beetlejuice succeeds. A suitably manic Keaton as the mischievous demon "bio-exorcist" scuttles across the film like a huge cockroach in a striped costume, while the decaying DNA of the original picture is evident in every hyperstylised frame of the sequel.

Michael Keaton in 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.'

Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros.

Possibly a touch too much at times. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice teeters on the brink of the same problems that derailed the most recent Ghostbusters sequel: the notion that decades-old ideas have been dusted off, dressed up, and masqueraded as new. Fortunately, what saves Burton's latest film, at least to some part, is the fact that those concepts were so outlandish and unique in the first place. Yes, Beetlejuice is derivative, but it's also endearingly unique and ragged around the edges. The director solves the issue of a non-returning original cast member not with an AI reconstruction, but with a charmingly shonky, lo-fi claymation animated sequence that concludes with the character's face being chewed off by a shark. Problem is solved, Burton style.

"As the now adult Lydia Deetz, Winona Ryder rocks exactly the same Bauhaus-groupie haircut as her teenage self in the first film"

This sequel is set in the present day, albeit time in Burton's world is fluid, with the now-adult Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) sporting the same eerie Victorian doll outfit and Bauhaus-groupie haircut as her teenage self in the first film. Lydia has attained superstar status as a TV personality: she is a "psychic mediator" and the host of Ghost House, a real-life hauntings show. However, she is only a shell of her previous spiky self. She is brittle and sensitive, browbeaten by a partner (a terrifyingly convincing Justin Theroux) who conceals his narcissism beneath a veil of woo-woo, carey-sharey new age therapy jargon.

"Where's that obnoxious goth girl who tortured me?" asks Lydia's stepmother, Delia (Catherine O'Hara), whose dilettantish flirtations with the art world have finally paid off: we encounter her when her Manhattan solo performance art show goes horribly wrong. Where exactly? Lydia appears to have undergone a complete personality transplant, passing on the role of a prickly adolescent with a love for black eyeliner to her rebellious daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega).

A family tragedy returns everyone to the house where it all began, providing an opportunity for the tenacious Beetlejuice to inveigle his way out of the underworld and finally claim Lydia as his unwilling husband. A bogus subplot is Monica Bellucci as Beetlejuice's scorned (and dissected) ex-wife, who has put herself together (literally) and set her sights on regaining her man. Willem Dafoe is a wonderful new addition to the ensemble, portraying a deceased actor who, in turn, plays a hard-boiled cop tasked with investigating rule infractions in the world of the dead; the gleeful silliness of scenes like this is when the picture feels most alive.

Beetlejuice, Burton's second major film (after Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985), was a watershed moment in his career. It was a calling card; it was the moment when he could fully express his macabre, goth-boy, grand guignol fantasies. And it solidified creative ties, both in front and behind the camera, that would last for decades. Perhaps the most renowned of these is Danny Elfman, who composed the score for Beetlejuice (as well as Pee-wee), and went on to collaborate on numerous following Burton films, including this one. The composer's contribution to Beetlejuice's score is archetypically Elfmanesque, as if it were played by a furious skeleton orchestra.

Other selections of music are a little more erratic; for example, using the Bee Gees' Tragedy to set the mood for a pivotal scene comes across as distractingly corny. Even though it falls short of the glorious absurdity of the Day-O (the Banana Boat Song) haunted dinner party sequence in Beetlejuice, a deranged version of MacArthur Park, performed by demonically possessed cast members, is an inspired extended set piece that feels true to the anarchic mischief of the original. This encapsulates the whole strategy of the film: it was never going to achieve the instant cult popularity of the original, but it has a great time trying.

In UK, Irish and Australian cinemas.