Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceReview: Michael Keaton Is Fit to Raise the Dead (Again!) in a Fun but Uneven Sequel

Mar. 15, 2025

Keaton as Beetlejuice, 26 years later.Photo:Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros.

Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros.

But you always have the option ofnotsaying his name that many times. Or at all. You can even start out saying “Beetlejuice” and change midstream to, say, “—mania.”

In other words, you can easily spare yourself this highly anticipated movie, an elaborate but very uneven retread that recycles many of the best elements from the firstBeetlejuice,including a variation on the great"Day-O"lip-syncing number. (Here the song is the sublimely illogical“MacArthur Park,” complete with its famous cake, gray as a tombstone, melting in the rain falling from a tiny cloud.)

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Keaton is still funny, and manic, and growling, but not unsettling — not something to tug at your unconscious in your dreams or your waking hours. You can almost take his grotesque vaudevillian enthusiasm for granted. It’s as if Pennywise fromIthad spent too many nights honing his standup routine for a Netflix special.

The film’s plot is an unnecessarily loose bag of bones, some of them inspired, some less so.

Ryder with costar Justin Theroux.Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Monica Bellucci as a wicked, wicked vamp.Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

Then there’sWillem Dafoeas a former actor, Wolf Jackson, now dead and with a large chunk of his skull exposed, who serves as the ghouls’ force for law-and-order. He barks out orders and chomps down on his words as if they were sandwich meat.

None of this would have been out of place inBeetlejuice 1,and maybe that’s the problem.

Beetlejuice 2doesn’t build on the first film or take Burton any further as a director. One of the most original movie-makers of his generation, he’s given us at least three classics —Edward Scissorhands, Batman ReturnsandSweeney Todd —and impressive oddities likeEd Woods, Sleepy HollowandBig Eyes.

But the success of his sensibility has also perhaps made it less distinctive in the long run, or at least less startling in its frequent touches of death-haunted beauty. He could be the Edgar Allan Poe of American cinema.

The most magical, Burtonesque image here is of those shrunken-headed minions, dressed in marigold suits and running around at night like Frankensteins rampaging down a runway. Both menacing and enchanting, they’re almost enough to make you chant “Beetlejuice!" three times. Maybe more.Beetlejuice Beetlejuiceis in theaters Sept. 6.

source: people.com