"Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" is an overstuffed toy bag of a movie: every minute or two, the director digs into the bag and produces a new toy. It's a return to form for director Tim Burton only in the sense that, like Burton early in his career, it's not interested in form, except at the immediate level of the image and the scene.
That's not a complaint, by the way. It's an observation. This movie is fun in direct proportion to how wanton and tossed-off it seems. One of the major characters is a blood-squirting torso that lost its head in a shark attack. There are animated creatures and one claymation-style sequence, dreams within dreams, multiple full-on musical numbers, several promises/threats of marriage, and a deranged final sequence that ranks with Burton's most decadent displays of pure inspiration. The movie seems to be having fun seeing how far it can push the content limits of a PG-13 rating (it probably deserved an R for graphic violence alone; perhaps it was saved from that fate by being outrageously funny, like Itchy & Scratchy cartoons on "The Simpsons").
What do you need to know, really? Winona Ryder returns as Lydia Deetz, the goth teen who was forced to marry the trickster demon Betelgeuse (aka Beetlejuice, aka Michael Keaton) in the 1988 original. Lydia is now a widowed professional medium in her forties who hosts a popular New York-based TV series called "Ghost House with Lydia Deetz," and has a teenage daughter named Astrid (Jenny Ortega of Burton's Netflix series "Wednesday") who loathes her. Lydia has a boyfriend named Rory (Justin Theroux) who is also her producer and credits himself with keeping the ex-pillhead Lydia on the straight-and-narrow (even though they both step off). Lydia's step-grandmother Delia Deetz (Catharine O'Hara) has become a multimedia gallery artist and influencer, which seems perfect considering who she was in the first movie.
They all end up back in Winter River after the sudden death of Delia's husband Charles (played in the original by Jeffrey Jones). And of course, they get entangled with Beetlejuice, facing his own existential threat courtesy of rampaging ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci). Delores is a soul-sucking demon who married The Juice, as he calls himself, back in the 14th century when he was robbing the graves of plague victims. She wants to reunite with him and is headed for his section of the underworld to seal the deal. Delores is less of a character or even a plot element than a means for Burton and co-screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (also of "Wednesday") to give the movie regular jolts of macabre energy. And she does. A hacked-up corpse who is introduced reassembling herself limb-by-limb with a staple gun, Delores's visual presentation will remind Burton completists of a character from his best work as a producer, Henry Selick's "The Nightmare Before Christmas": the patched-together rag doll Sally.
There's also a love story, kind of, between Astrid and a local boy (Arthur Conti of "House of the Dragon") who invites her for a date on Halloween night and correctly notes that she's dressed as scientist Marie Curie after she'd begun to die of radiation poisoning. The teen romance sections of "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" are retro-'80s Burton par excellence, evoking the intoxicating sensations of youthful attraction, driven by banter, music, and shared stories. There could've been more of this stuff. It's so terrific (thanks to Conti and Ortega's note-perfect performances, but also the way Burton stages and frames their interactions) that it could've been the centerpiece of a whole other film.
Keaton is sensational, as always. He slips into Beetlejuice's rancid skin again with the prideful glee of one of those blessed old guys who keeps his prom tuxedo in a hall closet and can put it on any time he likes and have it fit perfectly. But of the main returning cast members, Ryder is the standout. She conveys a sweetly glum and fragile presence, somebody who's been through a lot and changed as a result. She taps into the sense of a woman so dragged down by her mistakes and missed opportunities and random tragedies that she can't seem to get off the tracks she's been on for years now, or even change direction. Her re-emergence as a star (thanks mainly to the '80s nostalgia-fest "Stranger Things") is one of the best things to happen as a result of Netflix's ongoing cultural dominance. She plays a seasoned, slightly battered grownup here, but her flutey croak of a voice still has music in it. She's wonderful with Theroux, who has that Jon Hamm gift of being able to play a self-involved twit without telegraphing that he's not actually that guy.
The various elements don't cohere so much as coexist and sometimes jostle against each other. There are moments where the contrivances required to put characters in the same scene so they can communicate important information to each other are so awkward and obligatory that Burton seems to lean into them and turn them into a private joke between him and the audience. The building-out of the underworld as an alternative society with upside-down rules and morality is funny but not hugely original (the satire on bureaucratic office jobs and officials rubber-stamping forms feels time-warped in from the '80s, and not in a good way) but it's not a huge drag because that world is really just a huge, twisted playground for Burton, returning costume designer Colleen Atwood (a regular collaborator of Burton's since 1990s "Edward Scissorhands"), cinematographer Harris Zamabarloukos ("Belfast") and production designer Mark Scruton (another "Wednesday" hire).
Nobody who's seen a lot of Burton movies will come out of "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" stunned by the newness of what they've just witnessed. This is Burton doing Burton from the analog era to the extent that such a thing is still possible in 2024. Burton started out as an animator and carved out an identity as something like the Federico Fellini of high school goth. His persona was somewhere between an illustrator, a magician, and a prop comic. At some point in the mid-'90s, he seemed to force himself to care a bit more about plot (albeit with spectacular and welcome regressions like "Mars Attacks!"). But the films gradually came to seem too polished and calculated. And once he gave himself over to CGI, the movies mostly lost that handmade-seeming feeling.
It's fun to watch him take this project as an opportunity to return to his '80s roots as a director whose passion was building worlds, indulging his sensibility and trying to get away with as much as he could. The closing credits list probably hundreds of puppeteers and props fabricators. Every hot glue daub and jaggedy latex stitch and hand-painted margin detail is not only visible onscreen but contributes to the feeling that you're seeing a huge, fun thing that was made by humans, not software.
