Film Review - Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the new movie by Tim Burton and a sequel to the 1988 original that got both Burton and Michael Keaton their first Batman movie a year later, Keaton also returns as Beetlejuice who is hiding from his ex-wife (Monica Bellucci) meanwhile the Deetz family (Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and Jenna Ortega) are mourning the death of their father/grandfather and go back to the house from the first film and the ghost with the most comes back.

Every moment Michael Keaton is on screen in this movie is when the movie worked best for me as he feels like he played this role as if he had never left it, he brings a great manic energy and knows how to time the lines and the laughs and Burton as a director is smart enough to get out of his way and let him do his thing plus the film has some excellent visual effects and boy does it make a big difference when you have a director who knows what their doing in this field as too many nowadays don’t and it shows more often than you think, the effects here have that old school stop motion animation feel though one effect just kept me thinking of Dune when it came on screen.

But where Burton once again falls down is on the script level, this script is a real mess and lacks a strong focus to keep all of its story and character balls juggling in the air, there’s the storyline with Ryder’s character, the storyline with O’Hara’s character, the storyline with the ex-wife, the storyline with Ortega’s character and there’s a storyline with Willem Dafoe that feels superfluous and it honestly just felt like Dafoe going into Nic Cage territory where they don’t play a character but a meme of themselves.

As for the other storylines well they either don’t really go much of anywhere which is what happens with the Bellucci storyline and this was the storyline I was most interested in given that Burton has been divorced in real life or their not that interesting which is what happens with the Ryder and Ortega and O’Hara storylines, O’Hara seems to be DOING ALL OF HER LINES LIKE THIS AND YOU EXPECT TO SCREAM KEVIN!!!! and that gets pretty annoying after a while, Ryder seems bored at times and it only feels like she came back because Stranger Things went on a break while Ortega just is kinda there, she’s a good young talent but isn’t given much to do apart from be a pouty teenager.

And so that was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and it’s a mixed bag on the whole, there is fun to be had but this script is all over the place with storylines anchored by actors who are either wasted or playing memes of themselves or their not given the focus you what them to have, 2 and a half out of 5.