Film Review — Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Michael Keaton is energetic and fun in Tim Burton’s otherwise middling legacy sequel
If you aren’t already a convert to the Church of Tim Burton and his gothic comedy-horror schtick, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn’t the film to win you over. A much-belated legacy sequel to his 1988 hit with a singular use of the titular Betelgeuse misspelling, this is a middling effort with little in the way of artistic justification for its existence. It’s little more than fan service mandated by whatever corporate algorithm decided it was time to dust off Michael Keaton’s havoc-causing ghost, for a nice bit of profit.
In fairness to Keaton, he is, by far, the best thing about the film, which sparks to life whenever he’s onscreen. The rest of the time, it’s all a bit ho-hum, with a plot that takes too long to get going, and little else of great significance to add to the superior original outing. I suppose there’s a faintly interesting mother-daughter tale around the edges, but nothing that isn’t entirely predictable.
Thirty-ish years after events in the original film, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is now a television presenter hosting a cynically contrived programme dealing with hauntings and co-existence with ghosts. She is, by her own admission, a sell-out, and her misfit activist daughter…
