Tim Burton Tries to Get His Groove Back With Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

There was a time once when Tim Burton could do no wrong. He was the director responsible for bringing Batman to the silver screen in all his proper gothic glory, the man who made us all love a collection of outstanding freaks: Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Jack Skellington, Pee-wee Herman. He became acclaimed for his ability to build sometimes intimate, sometimes operatic, but always immersive, detailed, and unashamedly unusual film worlds for us to get lost in, from the dark streets of Gotham to the spooky Halloween Town of A Nightmare Before Christmas. Mention his very name, and one conjures up a certain whimsical macabre sensibility, indebted as much to German expressionism as it is to schlocky B-movie sci-fi and horror.

Recent years have not been kind to the guy. It's hard to pinpoint when exactly his prolonged slump began — was it Mars Attacks? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Alice in Wonderland? — but somewhere along the line, his signature style went from "acquired taste" to hopelessly cringe. Even he seems to have realized it — his last movie, a live-action remake of Dumbo, was so disappointing that it made him swear off ever working for Disney again.

So, what does a down-and-out director in a midlife crisis do when they need a bit of creative rebirth? In Burton's case, he's decided to revisit one of his most original, iconic films, the 1989 horror-comedy Beetlejuice, reuniting most of the original cast, including Michael Keaton as the titular "ghost with the most," as well as bringing back composer Danny Elfman, for a bigger and better legacy sequel titled, uh, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. (Oh damn, I said it three times.)
The first film, if you recall, was a tale of two families under one roof: the Maitlands, a nice, normal couple who happen to be ghosts, and the Deetz clan, comprised of financier husband Charles (Jeffrey Jones), kooky artist wife Delia (Catherine O'Hara), and goth daughter Lydia (Wynona Rider). Thirty-six years later, the Maitlands have shuffled off this mortal coil and left the lunatics running the asylum. Lydia has parlayed her ability to see spirits into a gig as an Elvira-style TV medium. (Some meta-commentary on Burton's own sellout status, perhaps?) She has a daughter of her own, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), from whom she's estranged after the death of the girl's father. Astrid thinks her mother is a fraud because she can't see her husband's ghost. A separate death in the family brings the whole clan, including Delia, still a kooky artist albeit a much more successful one, back to the family home in the small Connecticut town of Winter River for a funeral a few days before Halloween.

That would put them all in the crosshairs of Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), still haunting his would-be-bride Lydia after all these years, except he's got problems of his own in the Afterlife. We learn, in a complicated black-and-white flashback set during the Black Plague (related in Italian, for some reason), about Beetlejuice's past life as a grave robber and his crazy ex-wife, a soul-sucking cultist named Delores (Monica Bellucci) who poisoned him to death, and whom he chopped up in return. Well, she's back — she staples her separated body parts back together in one terrific scene — and she's hunting the trickster demon down and sucking souls in the meantime. There's also a marriage subplot for Lydia and her lame-ass manager/boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux), a love interest for Astrid that's not all he seems, and an art project of Delia's that does not end well.

It's a lot to keep track of, and some parts work better than others. The dynamic between Ryder's update of Lydia from sweetly sinister goth teen to fretful goth mom feels too much like a black-painted version of her Stranger Things character, Joyce Byers. Ortega's character, meanwhile, is meant to take the place of young Lydia, but Burton doesn't seem to know who she is or what to do with her. She's certainly not as active as her mother was — Lydia was the only ghost whisperer in a house full of nonbelievers, whereas the daughter is the skeptic now, resulting in the mother having more agency within the plot. The estrangement between the two is also played much more seriously than anything in the first film, a broad comedy whose protagonists treat their own tragic deaths as a mild inconvenience. Theroux's character, an even more questionable addition, is little more than a vehicle for hacky jokes about therapy and mindfulness. If he were taken out of the film, it would improve vastly, if not simply because it eliminates a pointless relationship that weakens one of the primary female characters. At least O'Hara's presence as wacky artiste Delia has a decent punchline to it.
Of course, Burton has always been more of an aesthete — equal parts Wilde and Warhol, concerned more with appearances and performance than characterization and story. His Batman movies excelled when they gave the floor to their flamboyant villains, and this film is at its most fun when Keaton is running hog wild as Beetlejuice, performing spectacular feats of body horror and telling dirty jokes. The rest of the casting bears this out: We have Willem Defoe and Danny DeVito, two actors known for distinctively odd appearances, and we have Bellucci, who says maybe five words in the whole film but provides enough of a striking presence to almost get away with how thin her character is. The special effects and wild underworld sets are great and refreshing, and the soundtrack is packed with everything from disco hits to Sigur Rós. Even then, the film can sometimes feel a bit excessive, such as in a sequence near the end calling back to the "Day-O" lip-synching possession scene from the original film that runs too long.

I don't exactly know how to feel about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It's not a masterpiece, but it is a fun enough watch, and its creativity puts it far enough over the line. If this is Burton getting his groove back, he could do worse. Yet something about it leaves me cold. Burton is an acquired taste — you either love him, hate him, or don't really care much one way or the other. I've always been in the camp of ambivalence, and this film does little to dissuade me.

If he had redesigned the Denny's menu, on the other hand.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, and Willem Dafoe. Directed by Tim Burton. Screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, story by Gough, Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith. 105 minutes. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday, September 6; check for showtimes at miaminewtimes.com/miami/movietimes.