The dead can dance in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” They shimmy and bop their way aboard a soul train to the great beyond, which is exactly what it sounds like, complete with afros and disco balls in a bustling Grand Central Station of the netherworld. It’s one of dozens of delightful throwaway gags in Tim Burton’s surprisingly spry sequel to his 1988 classic, a highly anticipated movie I don’t think a lot of people were anticipating would be very good. What a relief then to report that the return of Michael Keaton’s eponymous vaudeville ghoul is one of this spooky season’s most unexpected pleasures, a visually extravagant and blessedly inconsequential romp boasting a playful spirit we haven’t seen from this filmmaker in quite some time.
Burton’s outsider empathy and kitschy sense of the macabre captivated moviegoers with a run of uniquely personal blockbusters that helped define suburban alienation in the 1980s and ‘90s. But he’s squandered most of this century on pointless remakes, slapping his brand name on lumbering, ugly CGI spectacles like 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland” and 2019’s “Dumbo,” a weirdly self-loathing cautionary tale about selling out to evil corporations which felt like a lost artist’s cry for help. I don’t walk out of many movies, but I bailed on Burton’s 2016 adaptation of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” after 40 minutes because it felt like being locked in a Hot Topic after the mall had closed.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is a return to first principles for the filmmaker, reuniting (most of) the cast of his sophomore effort and cutting loose with the kind of goofy, retro puppet humor and gross-out effects that characterized Tim Burton movies back before they all started looking like digital sludge. There’s a handcrafted quality to the images and effects in this picture. Even the stuff that’s CGI is designed to look practical, with smooth computer animation given janky little quivers to seem more like traditional stop-motion. The movie feels like a person made it, which is a rare thing to say about a blockbuster sequel these days. It’s also light on its feet, which is even rarer.
Winona Ryder returns as Lydia Deetz, the teenage ghost whisperer now a middle-aged TV psychic with a resentful Goth daughter of her own. Jenna Ortega brings her Wednesday Addams deadpan to the big screen as the sullen Astrid, who torments her mother much in the way Lydia once tortured her stepmom Delia (Catherine O’Hara, quietly stealing the show). A family tragedy — which includes the single funniest and most creative way I’ve ever seen to shoot around a canceled actor — brings them all back to the old haunted house in Connecticut, where Keaton’s trickster demon Betelgeuse is still pining away for Ryder, who you might remember he once very nearly forced to become his bride.
But it turns out old Beet has an ex-wife of his own, a literal soul-sucker played by Burton’s cartoonishly voluptuous real-life squeeze Monica Bellucci. An objectively hilarious role to give your girlfriend, she’s the dismembered leader of a hell-spawn death cult who reassembles herself with a staple gun and goes looking for her former hubby. I knew the movie was going to be something special when their backstory takes the form of a black-and-white homage to horror filmmaker Mario Bava, complete with Keaton’s narration dubbed into Italian with English subtitles. Investigating her case is an afterlife inspector (Willem Dafoe) who back on our plane of existence was once a Method actor who got a little too into doing his own stunts, now playing his favorite cop role for eternity. It’s impossible to get tired of Dafoe referring to Keaton’s character as “Mr. Geuse.”
There’s a lot more, including Ryder’s simpering manager/boyfriend (Justin Theroux, somehow doing a little too much in a movie that revels in too muchness) and Ortega’s hipster love interest, who isn’t exactly what he appears to be. There are probably at least two sequels’ worth of plotlines crammed into Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s screenplay, yet the film flies by in a fleet 104 minutes. That’s at least half an hour shorter than most studio pictures run these days, and the brevity of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is very much the soul of its wit.
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Sight gags come at you fast and furious, the picture moving at the manic pace of Keaton’s motormouthed monologues. Burton crams every frame with gleefully grody stuff to look at, so your eyes don’t have time to take it all in. Extras in the afterlife are wearing their mortal wounds as they mill about these bureaucratic waiting rooms and crooked, German expressionist hallways, and I want to go see the movie again just to get a better look at the guy who died during a hot dog-eating contest, or the charred sad sack in the Santa Claus costume.
Ortega’s subplot bears a striking similarity to one in this past spring’s “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” and it’s telling to compare the two films. Both are unasked-for sequels to supernatural comedies from nearly four decades ago, but the bizarrely reverent new “Ghostbusters” movies creak under the weight of their own lore, taking deathly seriously the kind of dopey plot minutiae that “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” uses as a flimsy clothesline on which to hang jokes. I can’t help thinking this picture’s scene of a sad children’s choir singing “Banana Boat (Day-O)” at a funeral is a dig at how solemnly modern franchises take their fan service.
It’s the nature of Keaton’s chaos agent that he’s constantly breaking the rules of whatever reality you think the movie has established, so “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” keeps throwing new inventions and crazy ideas at the wall. Not all of them stick, but not all of them need to at such a frenetic pace. Keaton and Ryder are more energized onscreen than they’ve been in ages, going all in for a gonzo climactic musical number set to Richard Harris’ cover of “MacArthur Park.” (Don’t worry, the movie has room for the Donna Summer version, too. And yes, there’s even a cake in the rain.) It’s the kind of wonderful nonsense set-piece that has no reason to exist except because it’s funny and because it could. Same goes for the movie.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is now in theaters.