Would You Like a Marriage This Time?

As I noted in my review of the first film, I am not a fan of Beetlejuice. The film has its moments, but it’s more interesting when following its fantasy elements and showing cool, weird ideas than it is when it actually has to focus on its story. It’s a film all about its vibes, but loses steam whenever it has to do or say anything. Going back and watching it again recently I was struck by how little happens in the film, mostly letting its character wander around, be weird and kooky, and then rush to its ending to get anything done.

I know it has a fanbase, though, so I wasn’t that surprised when a sequel was finally announced. Hell, if you paid any attention to Hollywood news over the years then you know that Warner Bros. had been developing a sequel to the film practically since the first movie’s release. There were years where Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian was in development hell, with the studio absolutely sure they could break that story and make a functional film. That never happened, but the rumors continued swirling. One day, somehow, the studio would get another Beetlejuice.

Well, that day has come. The sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (with a title so good I actually kind of hate how good it is), finally was released, 36 years after the original, and has already become a hit in theaters (making $146 Mil its opening weekend against a budget of $100 Mil, ensuring it will have solid legs and a good final take all told). It reunited much of the cast of the original film, putting them into another weird and wacky, ghostly adventure with the titular “ghost with the most” returning to the spotlight. It had basically everything that fans of the original wanted, including returning director Tim Burton, and it is, well, what you’d expect from a Beetlejuice sequel. Whether or not that works for you really depends on how much you liked Beetlejuice.

The film opens with Lydia Deetz (Wynona Ryder) on her show Ghost House, a paranormal talk show where she chats with people who think their houses are haunted. Ever since the events of the first film, Lydia has been able to see ghosts so she knows when a place is haunted or not. It gives her show some. Air of legitimacy even as it’s pretty clear much of what is depicted is fake. Still, she just wants some peace and quiet away from the ghosts and the paranormal. Unfortunately, instead of getting that, her dad dies, so she has to pack up with her step-mother, Delia (Catherine O'Hara) and grab her estranged daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and head off to the old house our in the sticks to pack up her fathers belongings and say goodbye.

While this could be a time for Lydia and Astrid to bond, to finally let Astrid put aside her anger from the death of her father, Richard (Santiago Cabrera), many years earlier, instead things only get more strained. There’s Lydia’s boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux), a greedy hanger-on who came to the funeral and instantly proposes in the most awkward way. There’s a new boy that Astrid likes, Jeremy (Arthur Conti), who seems to be hiding something. And, of course, there’s Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), once more trying to return to the real world while his own ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), pursues him across the afterlife. Nothing will be normal for Lydia, but maybe she can find some kind of peace and closure once this backwater adventure is done.

Like its predecessor, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is an overstuffed film. It has a lot it wants to do, a lot of characters to introduce and play with and wrap up, and it puts them all into a fairly short runtime (104 minutes, all told) so it can rush through everything. That’s not to say that there’s nothing of value in the film, as I think the movie actually doesn’t get a lot right, but by the time everything comes to a head and the film reaches its climax, it's pretty clear that the writers weren’t sure how to balance it all and they just kind of gave up and forced the film to end.

The worst part of the film is the last act. Without spoiling anything (as, of the time of this writing, the film is only a few days old), the last act feels incredibly rushed. All of the various characters and storylines come together in about twenty minutes, and all get resolved without any actual grace or impact. Do Lydia and Astrid find a way to make peace with each other? Well, it should hardly be a spoiler to say that an obviously set-up storyline like that resolves in the last act, but this film does such a poor job of it that you don’t actually get a sense of any of the emotions of the characters. The same goes for the story of Lydia and her fiance, Betelgeuse and his ex-wife, Astrid and her boyfriend; everything is set up and then knocked down just as quickly, glossing right past the emotions and impact any of these beats should have had.

I don’t entirely blame Tim Burton for this. Bear in mind I do not like the director’s works (and this is where, as I do every time, I have to mention how much I hate his remake of Planet of the Apes), but he wasn’t the deciding voice on this film’s story; that was Alfred Gough and Miles Millar with additional story notes by Seth Grahame-Smith. Tim Burton was attached to the project for years, and was the only choice as director, but he was working on the script as written, and as approved by the studio, and there’s only so far you can stray from there. This feels like a third act that died on the page and it was too hard to save it in filming. Maybe it was retooling during reshoots, or in the editing bay, but whatever the case, this film’s lackluster third falls apart because everyone involved on the creative side couldn’t come up with anything better. Burton included, yes, but it’s not just his fault.

Thing is, up until that last act, I actually felt like the film was cruising along at a good pace, telling a pretty good story. The film is focused on the Deetz family (all three generations), wisely sending Adam and Barbara Maitland (the ghosts from the first film) off to the Great Beyond. This was wise as it really keeps the film locked in on the family dynamics and the important story that could be there. We feel for Lydia as she tries, and fails, to bond with her daughter. We understand Astrid when she flees her mother and finds a boy she can relate to. We even get the decisions that lead up to bringing Betelgeuse back and relying on his help (as you do, in the worst possible times). All of this works and functions as a real, proper adventure.

And there are solid, very funny moments that show the creative team was willing to have fun and take risks. At one point Betelgeuse recounts his backstory, and the film switches to the style of a black and white, Italian drama. It’s dumb but so very funny. In one section our heroes have to navigate around the Soul Train in the underworld and, yes, it literally goes all in on the 1970s vibe, with dancers getting their groove on. The introduction of Delores is great, and it promises a weird, interesting vibe to all her scenes. Moments like this actually lift the film up higher, creatively and comedically, than the first film. They made for an interesting film.

Frankly, I found myself enjoying this second film a whole lot more than the first. I like the big swings the film takes. I appreciated how it constructed its setup and story and how it moved through the plotlines. I actually like that it really had a story and wasn’t just a series of skits of ghosts being weird, along with some musical numbers. This film, for two acts, really brought something to the world of Beetlejuice, and I was appreciating what it was doing. If only its third act had been better.

This film needed a rewrite somewhere in its process, just to bring that last act together. It has a very weak, almost anticlimactic climax, and it feels like one more draft, or just a little more rewriting on set, could have fixed that. The film gets so much right before throwing it hard right at the end. It doesn’t completely ruin the film, as even this weak third act at least gets you through to the finish without completely overstaying its welcome… but it does come close. A good ending could have made this film an absolutely stunner. Instead it just kind of ends and you wish it could have done more.