Not so much beating an undead horse, more like apathetically poking it with a stick
In case the term "revival" wasn't suggestive enough, the ongoing sequelitis in the moviemaking world has many times been compared to unabashed necromancy. Although sequels to 1988's Beetlejuice were attempted a number of times, the capricious stars that preside over Hollywood refused to align until this century. The result is undeniably funny, but at the lowest-effort level. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice recycles many of the original's jokes and even copies its method of defeating the villain, and the new material it introduces is so underutilized that one wonders what's the point of having it in the movie.
When we first met the titular trickster ghost, he was a fearsome presence, menacing and treacherous. His day job was to terrorize the living, and his driving motivation was to escape the afterlife and enter our world permanently. In the sequel, his menace factor has been disappointingly defanged. No longer an irreverent troublemaker, he's now a businessman on friendly terms with the ghost police. In other words, he's become exactly the type of comfortable bourgeois that the first movie delighted in mocking. And the script gives him a decades-long obsession with the girl he tried to marry, which is a grave misunderstanding of his character. His attempted marriage to a human girl was merely a means to an end. This movie not only says that he still wants to marry her, but makes it his central goal, a plot point that ends up being key to him becoming exactly what he should never be: the hero who saves the day.
(The script pretends that the actual hero is Jenna Ortega's character, but it's Beetlejuice who fixes the big problem the movie centers on, although he does it very quickly and with little emotional impact, while Ortega's character gets a grand, dramatic, climactic moment for an action of negligible consequence, right before she gets a small, undramatic moment for a much more important one. I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum: the first action is to incur near-lethal danger to save Beetlejuice from a punishment he probably deserves, and the second action is to quote a legal technicality to save her mother from eternal agony. This movie is very confused about which stakes we should care about.)
Instead of the sharp-witted, opinionated girl we all had a crush on in the first Beetlejuice, adult Lydia Deetz is an anxious mess with a selective color-blindness to red flags. Her character comes off as so passive, so fragile, so easy to manipulate and so scared of everything that at times I wondered whether Winona Ryder had gotten confused and thought she was playing Joyce Byers from Stranger Things.
Speaking of badly written female characters, Monica Bellucci got a terrible deal out of this movie. She's given a fascinating backstory, impressive makeup, scary superpowers, several scenes of escalating setup, and then she's dispatched without a thought. She may as well not have been in the movie. The same confusing choice is made with Willem Dafoe's character, who, given the events of the plot, would be expected to play a pivotal part, but he's reduced to a recurring joke that gets tiresome the first time and ultimately has no effect on the story. These two characters are very good concepts that would have been better used in a different movie. Here, they just occupy space.
And then we get to Jenna Ortega's character, whose arc reveals the scriptwriters's biggest mistake: they treat Lydia's antipathy toward her shallow, greedy stepmother as a phase she had to outgrow, so they write Lydia's daughter as having the same relationship with her. This gives the movie a conservative vibe: parents are always right, kids had better listen, and rebelliousness is foolish. All of young Lydia's edginess has been meticulously sandpapered.
This is a pity, because the relationship between Lydia and her daughter is the emotional pillar that sustains the whole movie. At its core, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about a mother and a daughter who desperately wish to connect but don't know how, and finally get the push they need when they're each targeted by social predators. In a better version of this movie, the characters played by Bellucci (a spiritual parasite with a long trail of victims) and Dafoe (a poser in a role he can't play convincingly) should have provided thematic resonance to the dangers that Lydia and her daughter face in the human world, but, as I said above, they're barely there.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice makes up for all its faults with genuinely funny absurdity. But one misses the acerbic critique of its predecessor (Beetlejuice shares with Ghostbusters the brilliant premise of a group of jaded New Yorkers whose first impulse upon discovering that the paranormal is real is to monetize it). Michael Keaton's character is reduced to a family-friendly echo of his former, funnier self. But the worst choice in this movie is to add to the postmortem hellscape of eternal bureaucracy a next realm of blissful rest. I'm reminded of the 1975 season of Tom & Jerry, where the mortal enemies were rewritten as adventuring partners. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice waters down precisely the parts that were interesting about the original. There's a bit of unintentional irony in the fact that this movie contains a line that makes fun of Disney, even though it follows the same Disney modus operandi of sanitizing a scary world to render it inoffensive. Like its titular character, this movie is exactly the thing it pretends to criticize.
Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
