Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review

I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and here are my thoughts…

Beetlejuice returns to pull deviant mischief on the Deetz family while dealing with new characters…

So the best thing about this movie is the look. The sets, ghosts, creatures, lighting, and color grading are FULL Tim Burton. It’s so unique, colorful, and imaginative, and it rides that line between creepy and fun, perfectly, like the best haunted house.

Michael Keaton, no pun intended, kills it in the role. He has so much energy, comedic, timing, and carefree menace, it’s like he didn’t miss a beat over the last 36 years.

The entire cast brought their A-game. Catherine O’Hare is constantly hilarious, and Jenna Ortega continues to show her range as an up-and-coming actress (she could very easily be the next Emma Stone). Winona Ryder continued to be a great audience surrogate for all this craziness, bringing realism to this “undead circus”.

My favorite new character is Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson, a former actor turned undead, detective. he has some good, almost (again, no pun intended) deadpanned comedy. Plus, he has a subtle, recurring gag with his assistant, which I found very funny and clever.

Monica Bellucci is very striking as Beetlejuice's “Bride of Frankenstein esque“ ex-wife. You can you can tell she’s having a blast in the role.

It was nice seeing Justin Theroux again, it’s been a while, but he got a lot of comedic mileage out of playing a “pompous fame and self-obsessed new age shady dude”.

Danny Elfman does a very in theme and fun score, plus some cool more recognizable songs are incorporated.

I think my favorite scene is either a musical number towards the end, in which a lot of the cast get to show off their comedic chops in a fun way, or a “Beetlejuice origin” scene which feels ripped out of a 1960's Mario Bava horror movie. In the same way, Fede Alvarez studied the feel of Alien for Alien: Romulus, you can really tell Tim Burton's love and knowledge of those films because he captures them perfectly.

The voodoo head dudes with the big bodies were also fun, in a “ fun mascot type minions” kind of way, I feel like the younger viewers will get a kick out of them.

The character of Charles Deetz is in the movie, which they do think of a clever and kind of fun way to work around the whole “Jeffrey Jones situation”… for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, just Google it, he did some very bad things.

Unfortunately, there is a noticeable flaw with the movie storyline, or should I say “storylines”, namely, there’s way too much stuff going on in this movie. It’s like the writers came to Tim Burton and said “ok, we have six possible storylines for the movie, which ones do you want to focus on”, And Tim Burton said “Yes”, and they said “Yes to what?" and he said “all of them”. 

You got that Lydia and Astrid having tension storyline, you got Lydia dealing with her shady boyfriend storyline, you got Beetlejuice and his ex-wife storyline, you got Astrid developing a romance storyline, you have a Charles Deetz storyline, you got Beetlejuice and Lydia storyline, you got Wolf Jackson running around, Delia it’s up to shenanigans, and even hijinks happens with the voodoo guys that never comes back around.

Plus, two things happened in this movie that should be like big emotional or at least feel more important scenes, but just gonna come off as “ Well, this is nice”, and “Oh darn… ah well”. It could be the case, that, for the characters involved (and the knowledge of this world afterlife) how they react can be explained and fit within their characters, but even so it does feel like we should’ve gotten more out of it, but that could just be a personal thing with me.

But that’s kind of the problem with having all these storylines, things should feel more developed and have more payoff, but instead things feel underdeveloped or rushed a long because we’re trying to fit a certain runtime, which messed with the pacing. Not too bad, because I was never bored, but it definitely fell off.

Now to be fair this is a comedy, and there are plenty of comedies I love (like Animal House or Back to School) that are basically a bunch of different skits and scenarios thinly held together by a shoestring plot, but the first Beetlejuice movie had more ideas and stories going on than those films, so it does seem like a setback.

Plus they’ll spend big chunks in the movie building something up and then be like “Well that’s over now” and it’s like “That was anticlimactic”.

So on paper, this movie is scatterbrained and should not work as well as it does, but there’s just a unique charm and fun to the movie that while watching it, I found the storylines interesting, so you can’t help but have a good time.

Overall the movie has a lot of imagination, doesn’t take itself seriously, and is fun in a refreshing way (despite its flaws) which is pulled off mostly by the cast's dedication and strong skills as actors.

I give it a low four stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️