eric’s review published on Letterboxd:
i’ve written two reviews that have been eaten by letterboxd so far, third time’s the charm—just like when summoning betelgeuse!
despite committing some of the requel sins i loathe the most in the first twenty minutes, i mostly really liked beetlejuice beetlejuice. one of my favorite aspects of the original is how limited the scope is. almost everything in the real world takes place in the maitland house — we really never get any further than the bridge that kills them! by keeping the real world so limited, it services the afterlife as a vast, surreal, and capitalistic nightmare. did we really need to see delia and lydia linking up in the city? or pay a visit to jenna ortega’s astrid at boarding school? a stronger choice would have been to start with the deetz women returning home for the funeral and leave the rest up to audience interpretation, just as the original introduces the deetz family as they’re moving in. there’s also nothing about the original’s lydia that would lead you to believe she’d grow up to be an ooky spooky version of wendy williams. a big problem is that the lydia here doesn’t really seem like lydia at all, but a plot conduit in her clothes.
aside from a bleak & uninspired first act, one this long awaited sequel gets going it never really lets up. the use of practical effects and sound design are particularly strong here as they were in the original & the performances are, theroux aside, pretty excellent. catherine o’hara is the real mvp here, i find delia deetz to be so aspirational. significantly better than anything else tim burton has made this century & it isn’t even close!
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