#66: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Release Date: September 6th, 2024
Format: Theater (Cinemark at The Pike Outlets in Long Beach, CA)
Written by: Alfred Gough and Miles Millar
Directed by: Tim Burton
3.5 Stars
On the walk home from the theater with D, I was trying to think of movie sequels that took as long to get to theaters as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice took to follow Beetlejuice, which is a gap of 36 years. I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head. The closest I came was Dumb and Dumber To (20 years) and The Godfather Part III (16 years). Now that I’m home with Google at my fingertips, I can’t believe I forgot Top Gun: Maverick (also 36 years).
I think it’s telling that Dumb and Dumber To and The Godfather Part III were the ones that came to my mind. They are borderline traumatic viewing experiences if you love the originals. They are unmistakably bad movies, to the point where most fans tend to deny their existence (and just to clarify my stance on these two sequels: The Godfather Part III is just a run of the mill bad movie; Dumb and Dumber To is an all-time failure of a movie and one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen).
My point is, it was this ‘long-gestating-sequel-to-a-beloved-classic’ fear that was running through my head during the first 30 minutes of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice that really put a damper on my mood.
Thoughts like:
Is this just a cash grab?
Am I going to be sad after all of this?
Is Tim Burton creatively running on empty?
I mean, there are lots of parallels between Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Dumb and Dumber To and The Godfather Part III, the most obvious parallel being their directors. Much like Francis Ford Coppola in the late ‘80s and The Farrelly Brothers in the ‘10s, the ‘20s find Tim Burton a little rudderless and with a majority public opinion that his best work is behind him. When the original Beetlejuice came out in 1988, it was in the midst of his creative explosion of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Batman (1989), and Edward Scissorhands (1990). You could make an argument that Tim Burton has the best four initial entries into his filmography of any director ever. I wouldn’t make that argument personally, but it could be made.
Compare that to Burton’s last four movies prior to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: Dark Shadows (2012), Big Eyes (2014), Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children (2016), and Dumbo (2019). To be fair, I’ve only seen Big Eyes of these four (which I thought was pretty bad), but none of them connected with movie audiences the way his early work did. For some reason he seemed to mostly abandon his signature milieu and personal themes and got kind of lazy. Or maybe uninspired. When I see early Burton films I see a lot of heart, a young artist toiling away. Middle-aged Burton seemed a bit bored.
So here I am sitting in the theater with D, whose favorite movie all-time is the original Beetlejuice, and I’m nervous. The opening scene is flat, and I’m mostly looking at Winona Ryder and the set and thinking, ‘Wow, 36 years to reprise a story. That’s crazy. I hope this doesn’t suck. I hope I’m not politely tolerating this or trying to convince myself that it doesn’t suck. When is Michael Keaton going to show up? Oh no, I hope he’s funny. It will be so embarrassing if he goes all in on Beetlejuice and the jokes are just falling flat. I hope he doesn’t embarrass himself. And I hope Catherine O’Hara is good. What if she’s not good?’ And on and on and on and on.
And then slowly Winona Ryder becomes Lydia Deetz in my mind and I relax a bit. And then Catherine O’Hara shows up, and she’s funny. And then Michael Keaton shows up, and it’s a regular party. Beetlejuice is killing it, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is going to be just fine. Relax. We have much more of a Top Gun: Maverick situation happening here than a Dumb and Dumber To or The Godfather Part III situation. What we have is a fun sequel, in the hands of a director and actors who seem to care about these characters and this movie’s audience.
And we’re having fun! I just want to emphasize that point. Once I realized I wasn’t going to have to cringe my way through this thing, I was smiling like an idiot during the entire last hour of the movie.
Here’s to hoping that this movie can rekindle something in Tim Burton and that he has a few magical visions left in him.
