In the amended words of LL Cool J, don’t call Beetlejuice Beetlejuice a comeback for Tim Burton.
While, sure, the macabre master has lost a bit of his fastball over the years after mounting one of the best-ever runs of any filmmaker at his height.
However, the boundless energy and sheer force of creative will from his earlier work has flashed at times over the last decade-plus, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice plays more like the last step into a hard-fought second wind than a full-fledged revival out of nowhere.
Burton seems like he’s having the time of his life taking the Deetz family back to Wind River and seated front-and-center for Michael Keaton’s grotesque ghost with the absolute most. Eschewing the more shameless fan plugs of legacy-sequel’s past and still managing to go down like a bowl of eyeball soup on a chilly Halloween night, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the best kind of spooky comfort food.
This is not only Burton’s most successful film since Frankenweenie, but perhaps his most positively spiritual effort since Big Fish. Burton puts his whole, beating heart into this project, mining every single practical effect, gross-out sight gag and note of pitch-perfect Keaton mischievousness he can. This film feels alive and deeply worthy of revisiting in a way that long-gestating sequels rarely are. While you’ll find familiar haunts here, getting Burton fully back in his candy bag is just not something to take for granted.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice stalks a very fine line of wanting to tell a fresh story and needing to needing to play to the creep seats, with each winky nod to the 1988 original balanced out with something we haven’t gotten before (at least, you know, in a movie about Betelgeuse). Sure, a children’s choir sings a tongue-in-cheek rendition of “Banana Boat (Day O)” during a funeral, but you also get Willem Dafoe playing an undead Hollywood cop and an entire flashback told in homage to the stylings of Italian horror legend Mario Bava.
That’s why, for all of the “sequelitis-as-rigor mortis” that automatically sets in with any follow-up like this, the film still shines with a fresh coat of black paint on its hooting-and-hollering hearse. Burton just feels completely unshackled from the weight of becoming a hired studio gun and much, much more capable of being himself in a format he knows very well.
Even though the general story is a bit telegraphed to see what’s coming, you just cannot predict how funny it is to see Burton working in this space again, to see him revel in Betelgeuse spilling his literal guts onto the floor while, ahem, gaslighting as the afterlife’s worst couple’s counselor.
It’s just delightful to see actors like Keaton (who is absolutely dynamite here), Dafoe, Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega, Catherine O’Hara (a scream), Monica Bellucci and Justin Theroux play on Burton’s deeply demented playground, all perfectly attuned to the filmmaker’s dry sense of humor and able to switch up sarcasm to genuine suspense on the flip of a dime. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s very witty script zigs and zags into so many directions that it’s a bit hard to really get your teeth on the pacing, but Burton is having so much fun back in this space that you almost don’t really care all that much for the flaws.
That’s probably why Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is such a rousing success. It’s one thing to notice what doesn’t work about a movie. It’s another to feel so motivated to scoot those flaws over into the dug grave and pat the dirt down so you can bask in the graveyard moonlight. The climax musical sequence set to Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park” of all songs is both deliriously funny and genuinely jaw-dropping, and you almost want to give the film’s shortcomings an automatic mulligan based on how brilliant that is alone.
It’s just beyond great to have Burton back in his element after a period away from the uncanny valley, as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is stitched together with a lot of ghastly love and prankish passion. Even after all these years, Burton still finds a way to crawl into your heart and remind you why there are just few cinematic experiences as satisfying as the ones born of his imagination.
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