Michael Keaton returns as the ghost with the most in Tim Burton’s majestically gonzo encore of the hereafter
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Starring Michael Keaton, Winona Rider, Catherine O’Hara & Jenna Ortega
Rated PG-13
Directed by Tim Burton
In theaters Sept. 6, 2024
After just a tad over 35 years, the ‘Juice is again on the loose.
Michael Keaton is back and doubling down on his memorable role as moviedom’s quippiest gross-out ghoul, while Winona Rider and Catherine O’Hara return as older versions of their characters from the first film and new additions (Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci) freshen things up with a new wrinkle or two.
And director Tim Burton also resurfaces for this majestically gonzo encore of the hereafter, a cinematic carnival ride festooned with quirky stop-action oddities, subversively dark humor and wildly unpredictable bursts of imagination. It’s like Pee-Wee Herman on a playdate with Edward Scissorhands in Dante’s Inferno. But the star of the show is clearly Keaton, as unhinged and untethered as he should be, the ghost with the most, a cadaver of cad, the lewd ladykiller slob from beyond still lookin’ for love.
And like Beetlejuice, Keaton is game for anything, throwing himself into the crazy comedic churn of a storyline that includes ghostly office drone workers with teeny shrunken heads, an RIP’d actor (Willem Dafoe) policing crime in the underworld, a soul-sucking spurned lover (Monica Bellucci), a jaded undead janitor (Danny DeVito) and a teen girl (Jenna Ortega) whose crush on the boy next door (Arthur Conte) gets her pulled into the afterlife. There’s a hustle-bustle subway to the great hereafter—the Soul Train—pulsing with disco, and a pull-out-the-stops grand finale to “McArthur Park” that out-wows even the original film’s “Banana Boat (Day-O)” scene for wonderful weirdness.
There’s a lot of connective tissue to the first film, both stylistically and thematically, with sight gags and throwback references to the original. Ortega, the star of two Scream flicks as well as the TV series Wednesday (the spinoff of The Addams Family), brings a full-circle generational spin to her role as the daughter of Rider’s Lydia Deetz, now working as a TV spiritualist. Absent: Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin, who played a ghostly couple central to the story back in 1988, as is Jeffrey Jones, whose conviction as a sex offender now keeps him mostly out of Hollywood’s spotlight—but whose former character nonetheless “appears” here in a couple of inventive workarounds.
But there’s so much going on, the no-shows are barely missed. And Monica Bellucci (above) gets the film’s hands-down best new-character entrance, as her seductive wraith Delores literally pulls (and staples) herself together after spending centuries with severed body parts scattered hither and yon. It’s perhaps Burton’s wry cinematic nod to the career of the multi-lingual Italian model-turned-actress, a journey made up of bit parts and odds and ends including portraying the bride of Dracula, Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a rape victim in the controversial Irreversible, and the oldest “Bond girl” in the history of the franchise (Spectre). In the new Beetlejuice, she’s certainly the gal to die for—and as Beetlejuice remarks, she’s certainly looking very put-together.
And Tim Burton’s grand-guignol resurrection of the bawdy Beetlejuice puts together a new dose of movie moxie for a familiar franchise that’s already expanded into TV animation, videogames and a Broadway musical. It proudly unfurls its freak flag and lets it fly anew, a spooky-fun and retro-riffic way to spend 90-odd minutes with a spunky spirit who’s apparently still got a load of afterlife left.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 