Directed by Tim Burton | Written by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith | 105 min | ▲▲△△△| Crave
Due to the film festival season I’m late catching this very late sequel, but it turns out that’s OK. No one need rush to see this.
The return to Tim Burton’s breakout hit 35 years later was always going to be a hit-and-miss proposition, the odds stacked against him being able to recapture that particular creepy and hilarious brew of goth culture and humour, even with original cast Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, and Catherine O’Hara on board. The production values are very much a match for the original, but the script and performances are nowhere near as inspired. The picture ramps up and then holds for a whole lot of middling, rambling weirdness.
It does a lot of heavy lifting early on to bring us up to speed on all the changes since Lydia Deetz (Ryder) was a teenager — she’s now the host of a ghost hunting TV show, putting her gift of seeing dead people to good use. The ghost couple played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin are no longer in the picture, and neither is Jeffrey Jones’ Charles Deetz for a whole bunch of good reasons — the movie explains his unexpected death with a bit of cheery animation, an inspired solution, though having his headless/shoulderless body roaming around the bureaucratic portion of the afterlife is maybe less so.
Lydia has a teen of her own, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who thinks her mother is a charlatan, and a boyfriend, TV producer Rory (Justin Theroux). Stepmother Delia (O’Hara) is still a conceptual artist in the city, though insists on returning to Winter River, Connecticut, to the “Ghost House,” to have a memorial for Charles, dragging Lydia and Astrid along with her.
Naturally, the bio-exorcist, Beetlejuice (Keaton), has his own plans, still haunting Lydia from beyond the veil. He’s also being haunted, by his ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), a real bride of Frankenstein looking for some payback.
Why she is, exactly, is a bit of a mystery — just one of the many plot holes that collect through this sequel’s running time, most of which could be forgiven if Burton and his collaborators were able to recollect what made that first movie so much fun — the ooky, spooky imagination on display laced with plenty of laughs. This movie isn’t funny. There’s no line nearly as good as this one: ” I myself am strange and unusual.” or, “She’s sleeping with Prince Valium tonight,” or even, “I’ve seen The Exorcist about a 167 times, and it keeps getting funnier EVERY TIME I see it!”
Keaton seems a bit deflated here, unable to generate the frenzied, demonic energy he brought the first time, which is a real issue — the movie has an antagonist problem. Neither Keaton nor the otherwise potent Bellucci feel like any kind of a threat.
This sequel looks good and has some visual imagination, though mostly it just coasts on what worked the last time. A late-arriving sequence scored to Jimmy Webb and Richard Harris’ weird-ass “MacArthur Park” is delightful, and its always good to see Ryder doing what she does on the big screen, but it’s not enough to save what’s otherwise a going-through-the-motions movie experience. Ortega is clearly a star, but here conveys an emotional range from sour to slightly less sour, and Theroux’s stiffness makes you miss the natural quirk of Burton’s frequent collaborator, Johnny Depp.
In only his second sequel, it feels like Burton’s old tricks don’t work anymore. Hopefully he’ll leave Edward Scissorhands and Mars Attacks alone and try something new the next time out.
