Michael Keaton must be wondering if anyone is interested in anything new he has to offer. A year after reviving his Batman – not the facsimile thereof he played in Birdman – for The Flash, now Keaton has been asked to resuscitate (quite literally) his other most iconic role from the 1980s in Beetlejuice Beetejuice. What’s next, a Mr. Mom reboot? Grandpa Mom, maybe?

The era is alive and well? – well, it’s a live anyway in the movie that reunites two other prominent cast members from that film, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, as well as its director (Tim Burton) and composer (Danny Elfman). And it does truly feel like a throwback to another time, a time when movies regularly featured a Hanna Barbera version of ghouls and goblins who danced around gothic sets and expressed their surprise by their eyes jumping out of their heads and their tongues unfurling like party blowers. As many different things as we do at the movies nowadays, we don’t really do that anymore, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reminds us of a simpler time when it had a certain charm.

The charm has not entirely worn off, and the movie does have some moments of inspired lunacy. It also has essentially no narrative structure or stakes, and is really more of a vibe than anything else. That’ll be enough for some people, especially fans of the original. It might leave some others feeling perplexed in addition to their undeniable feelings of amusement.

Lydia Deetz (Ryder) is now a TV medium with a popular show called Ghost House, in which she films herself going into haunted houses to confront the spirits. Most of her audience likely knows it’s fake – these shows always are – except the joke is that it isn’t. The young Lydia in the original Beetlejuice could always really see the spirits, particularly the title character, a naughty demon conjured into existence by saying his name in triplicate. (Which means if this movie performs well, there will almost certainly be a Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.)

Lydia’s mother (O’Hara) is now a famous performance artist, and her father is now no more. (They might have gotten Jeffrey Jones to reprise that role, except he was arrested on child pornography charges around the turn of the century.) Some of the nominal plot involves mourning his passage – a scene depicted whimsically in claymation, and involving being bitten in half by a shark – while the rest involves Lydia’s impending marriage to her producer and boyfriend, Rory (franchise newcomer Justin Theroux). You know he’s a twit because he publicly proposes to Lydia at her own father’s wake, in front of everybody. Their wedding is scheduled to be two days later, on Halloween.

Meanwhile, bringing her gothic teenager sensibilities from the Netflix show Wednesday, Jenna Ortega plays Lydia’s daughter, Astrid. She hates having a famous mum and nan and the kids at school make fun of her for it. They’re all going to have worse problems on their hands when Beetlejuice is summoned into existence again, though Beetlejuice has his own problems as he tries to evade his ex-wife, played by Monica Bellucci, who is literally a soul sucker in that she consumes the life force from her victims and leaves them like deflated skin balloons on the floor.

There’s enough new (the soul sucking) and enough old (the delightful shrunken head creates from the original, as well as the second-most-famous sand worms to appear at the movies in 2024) to feel like the making of this movie was fueled by some combination of creative energy and fan service. But in a tale repeated again and again by film critics, this is yet another instance of using previous intellectual property as a safety net to hedge against box office losses. Everyone still looks suited to play their original roles from nearly 40 years ago, and even if Keaton is in his mid 70s now, he’s slathered with thousand-year-old corpse makeup, so he mightn’t have aged a day. Resistance to the making of such a movie is essentially futile. We live in the era of long-delayed sequels, and if we’re not used to it by now, we never will be.

There is, as we said, some inspired lunacy. In one of the many sequences that take place in that netherworld where Beetlejuice and the other walking corpses with knives sticking out of their heads spend most of their time, we get to experience the whole cast singing a cover of Richard Harris’ “McArthur Park.” (If you don’t know that song, you might know its most famous and deliciously ridiculous lyric, sung in a melodramatic crescendo: “And I’ll never have that recipe … again!”) It’s one of a couple such songs (won’t spoil the others), and there’s an extra bit of humour in that the characters move their lips against their will as they are under Beetlejuice’s control. At moments, the movie reaches the sort of operatic high camp that we only thought was possible in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

That’s high praise from this critic, but it’s a peak Beetlejuice Beetlejuice only reaches a couple times. The rest of the time, it hovers in that territory of almost but not quite, which is probably as much of a percentage of success as many viewers will need. There’s also a bit of a wobbly tone here, as the movie goes for sentiment out of the blue and there’s a clear abruptness whenever that happens, since that mode is out of sync with what it seems like this movie is going for.

For those who were putty in the hands of Tim Burton for the first 20 years of his career – maybe not so much the next 20 – this is a good return to form for the director. The original Beetlejuice found the budding talent at his most raw and inspired, not how he became later, when his own safety net was employing Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in every single film. There’s enough of that rawness and inspiration here to make for a pretty good time at the movies, as this film is unafraid to be janky and weird. Not everything may work. But when a studio is excavating IP to increase its profit floor, the things that don’t work might be a sign that Burton is doing something right.

 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opened yesterday in cinemas.