Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Richard

Review by Richard Patron

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice 2024

★★★½

Watched 24 Sep 2024

This was my first trip to the cinema without the kids since The Rise of Skywalker*, and it felt kind of appropriate to mark this momentous occasion with a thick slice of nostalgia. Of course, Hollywood has been reanimating the corpses of long-dead films for years, but it is great to see there’s still some (after)life in Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice himself remains a surprisingly peripheral figure but, once again, Michael Keaton makes every second of screen time count. If anything, he seems even more manic than last time and, as befits an undead prankster, he hasn’t aged a day.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is at its best when it embraces the chaotic weirdness of the original, although it often focuses on more grounded stories of romance and family relationships. Sadly, this occasionally leaves Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe feeling like they’ve wandered in from an earlier draft, but their characters both do a great job of fleshing out Beetlejuice’s history and the hidden world he inhabits.

It is great to see Lydia Deetz channeling her inner Yvette Fielding as a TV paranormal investigator, with Jenna Ortega having now taken on Winona Ryder’s mantle as the era’s defining gloomy goth teenager. Their relationships both with each other and with their prospective love interests—Justin Theroux as a new-age bullshitter, and Arthur Conti as a pretentious teenager—provide some heart, but it often feels like they are competing with the film’s more surreal and outrageous moments. It is a tonal balancing act that doesn’t always land, with some of the more emotional moments feeling underdeveloped compared with the fantastical hijinks.

The humor is as dark and mischievous as ever, but there are moments where it feels like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is trying a little too hard to recapture the magic of its predecessor. A few jokes land flat, and the pacing is a little uneven, especially in the second act, where the story takes some detours that don’t always pay off. However, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is still a lot of fun. It might not be as creatively inspired or original as Beetlejuice, but it delivers more than enough laughs, scares and weirdness to justify its resurrection.



*A gap of 1,733 days, but it would be only one day until my next visit to see The Substance!

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