Overview
After a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia's life is turned upside down when her teenage daughter, Astrid, accidentally opens the portal to the Afterlife.
I have to admit that this film took its time to gel with me – I wasn’t vibing with the early act as it felt very different tonally to the original film, which is more because of how far Burton has matured as a filmmaker over the decades. As such, coming into this straight on the back of having recently rewatched the original was a tad jarring. However, the mid point of the film started to become more like the chaotic fury of madness that we expected – for good and for bad.
We know that Burton has been trying to make a sequel over the last few decades, and I got the impression from this that he had multiple different scripts over the decades, and kind of cherry picked his favourite moments from each and cobbled them together.
The chaotic nature is fun, but is is a tad busy as a story, and there doesn’t appear to be a singular byline of connective tissue. Some characters are introduced but end up having barely any impact on the overall story, even though each of them are wonderfully crafted and portrayed. It feels like there is a 6 episode Beetlejuice TV series buried within here, and each of the separate stories, loosely connected to the Deetz family, could have made for an amazing show – but the end feeling is that many great ideas are underserved in being in a single film. The first film was extremely simple in story, whereas this throws everything in the mix and hopes some of it sticks.
Look, I had fun, and there are some notable moments that punctuate the runtime (mostly whenever Keaton is present) to bring it all together, and a memorable ear-worm musical moment that you will either absolutely delight in, or find gratingly overlong (I’m in the first camp), but there is a sense that we didn’t really get the sequel that the original deserved.