Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – Coming 36 years on, this follow-up to the director’s definitive paranormal comedy is a gleefully zany farce filled with knock-out punchlines and excellent practical results.
Betelgeuse is almost from the finish. Or instead, Betelgeuse is still dead, but he’s about, anyway. It’s been an incredible 36 years since Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice presented the character, a sinister sleazeball recreated by Michael Keaton, though Hollywood living Hollywood, no intelligent property is permitted to rest in accord for eternity. So now Burton has produced a sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which was the opening movie at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
I can’t tell I had high expectancies; after all, the final time a 1980s supernatural humor was given a sequel after multiple decades of waiting, the underwhelming effect was Ghostbusters: Afterlife. So it’s a comfort to convey that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is better like a gorier, freakier, and altogether slimmer match of Top Gun: Maverick. That is, it’s a sequence that has come forth after 36 years. Delivers clever and devoted homage to its precursor, but exceeds that prototype in almost every reference. Of course, it’s convenient that Keaton was encrusted in corpse make-up in the first movie. So his Betelgeuse can examine much the exact today as he did in 1988.
The nicest shock is that occasional thing, big-budget humor that is amusing. The script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar is filled with knock-out punchlines, and Burton’s illustrated gags care to be laughable even. While testing the limitations of how macabre and eccentric a Hollywood blockbuster can be. A critical issue is that instead of depending on CGI. He uses such advantageous results as prosthetics, puppets, and bucketloads of goo. All of which makes the jokes both more humorous and awful.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
The film’s only drawback is that it has a pair of plotlines too numerous. Which gives it a drawn-out center and a rushed and messy finale. It could include done with spending more time with Betelgeuse. Keaton’s snorting mischief now has a seated job in the underbelly. A nightmarish bureaucracy inhabited by failed souls with a combination of imaginatively gruesome mutilations.
But he always pines behind Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the unhappy teenage goth he attempted to wed in the first film. Lydia is currently a “psychic mediator” who gives a TV show created by her wonderfully self-centered boyfriend (Justin Theroux). She even has a disappointed teenager of her own, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who is unsettled by what she believes to be her mother’s dishonest claims to see deceased people. And Lydia always doesn’t get on with her stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara).
As in Top Gun: Maverick, the lengthy gap between the aging film. And the new one hangs out to be restorative. Instead of appearing like a retread, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice stands up as a satire with its account and its problems. It can be particularly moving on the hardships of aging, being a parent, and negotiating with bereavement. But then it consistently returns to ghoulish and cartoonish fun again.
