Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
The lecherous bio-exorcist of Tim Burton’s fevered imagination returns to charm (and disgust) a whole new generation.
Bob is back: with Willem Dafoe
Image courtesy of Warner Bros.
It kinda started with Top Gun: Maverick. Then this July we had the belated sequel to Twister (1996) which, in the form of the ruthlessly thrilling Twisters, arrived all of 28 years later. Now we have the sequel to Beetlejuice, which was originally directed by Tim Burton back in 1988. Today Tim Burton is 66 but has lost none of his drive or mojo, bringing Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetlejuice) back from the dead with a fanfare of manic inspiration, as if plugged directly into the mains of his creative spirit. Maybe the times that we live in have caught up with Burton’s macabre sensibility, thus enabling a movie about death, decay and disembowelment entirely palatable for a younger audience. They appear to be loving it.
Representing that demographic, Jenna Ortega (Wednesday Addams in Tim Burton’s Netflix series of the same name) plays the teenage daughter of Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz, the latter now a full-blown TV star exploiting her skills as a psychic mediator. Lydia was the pallid, Gothic teenager in the first film who communed with the spectral inhabitants of her family’s new home – since when Alec Baldwin (Rust) and Geena Davis (Blink Twice) have moved on.
It can’t be easy to live in the headspace of Tim Burton, what with his morbid preoccupations, but he’s obviously been given a new lease of life with his love for Monica Bellucci, here playing a woman of many parts (literally). But the director’s biggest coup is engineering the return of Michael Keaton in the title role, the title role, who has lost none of his joie de mort, in spite of being 36 years older. “The Juice is loose!”
This sequel belongs squarely in the land of Tim Burton, with its pictorial aplomb, imaginative trickery and cross-cultural allusions. Cramming in everything from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and M.C. Escher to Child’s Play and Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill!, Burton blasts the viewer with a non-stop barrage of visual and musical gags, drawing on the derring-do of his willing performers. There are many brilliant, side-splitting set pieces, including (early on) a stop-motion animated flashback to the death of Jeffrey Jones’ Charles Deetz (who, in seconds, undergoes a death by plane crash, drowning and shark attack). And echoing the ‘Day-o (Banana Boat Song)’ routine from the first film, he gives us an epic musical sequence in which his actors disbelievingly mime to Richard Harris belting out his unexpected 1968 hit ‘MacArthur Park.’ It’s a priceless coup de théâtre.
Older viewers will obviously enjoy (and get) these pop-cultural riffs, while those who have no idea who Robert Wiene or the singer Richard Harris is, should enjoy the icky special effects and production design, which are genuinely awesome. Suddenly, sequels have never been this good.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Danny DeVito, Burn Gorman, Amy Nuttall, Santiago Cabrera.
Dir Tim Burton, Pro Marc Toberoff, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Tommy Harper and Tim Burton, Ex Pro Brad Pitt, Screenplay Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, Ph Haris Zambarloukos, Pro Des Mark Scruton, Ed Jay Prychidny, Music Danny Elfman, Costumes Colleen Atwood, Sound Jimmy Boyle.
Plan B Entertainment/Tim Burton Productions/The Geffen Company/Domain Entertainment-Warner Bros.
104 mins. USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 6 September 2024. Cert. 12A.
