Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

It's awful.

I'm still putting my thoughts together, but I think my main issue with it is that its too normal?

You said yourself that the script was terrible -- which it is.  It takes a surprisingly long time to get to what the actual plot is, compared to the much more efficient and effective storytelling of the first.  You could completely cut Monica Belluci's character out of the movie, and it wouldn't make any difference; she was pointless.  They dumbed down Lydia for no reason, and the explanation they tried to give for that felt flat.  The movie was missing real heart, but above all else...for a comedy, I just didn't find this to be very funny.  Whether it be a majority of the jokes themselves or the overly broad way Burton directed the actors.  Michael Keaton still delivered and even Catherine O' Hara got some good zingers, but for large stretches, I wasn't laughing and instead thought I was seeing was pretty stupid.  I really tried with this, and kept waiting for it to get better, but after a certain point, I realized it wasn't going to.

I feel that MovieBuff801 would have connected with the themes of life & death. Lydia was so obsessed with the dead that she ignored the living. Delia was so obsessed with herself that she learned to love again in the afterlife. Astrid's anger drove her to the wrong person and almost cost her life. It's a messy script, but I can see the intentions, and audiences are clearly connecting with it.

Don’t worry. Dracula will restore balance to the force.

Rewatch the original.

I don't think I'm off base.  The original was all of a tone.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice(9/4/2024)
This movie has a bigger budget than the original movie, obviously, and Burton uses that to expand on some of his vision of the franchise’s comical afterlife. Buton has a lot of fun doing makeups for the various ghosts here representing their various causes of death, but he also doesn’t get so carried away with production values that the movie feels completely modern and disconnected from that original film. I’m sure there’s CGI in play here but it’s been used in a way that imitates practical effects and the film avoids doing outlandish things that could only be done by computers. I do wish the film was a little more disciplined like that with the screenplay however because this thing has way too many characters and subplots for its own good. It kind of feels like the writers here came up with a different plotline for each character but never decided which of them should be the “A-plot” so they just used all of them. Particularly glaring in this is a character played by Monica Bellucci, who’s set up as the film’s main antagonist and certainly looks cool, but her storyline ends up going nowhere and being kind of superfluous. In a lot of ways I think the film is as full of stray threads as it is because, well, at the end of the day I’m not sure it really has that much to say or that much of a story to tell… but not every movie needs to be meaningful I guess. What ultimately saves the movie is that it’s revisiting a world that hasn’t really been over-exposed and over exploited by pop culture and that makes it relatively fresh. There are limits to how much I can defend this thing but at the end of the day I did have fun with it and while I can identify plenty of flaws with it the fact of the matter is they didn’t really bother me that much.
*** out of Five

Chalk up Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as the biggest disappointment of the year so far for me. I was really rooting for it, hoping it'd be a return to form for Tim Burton, especially since he kept proclaiming that this was the most fun he'd ever had making a movie. Alas, though, this doesn't deliver. In fact, I'll go further: I hated this. Yet, it wasn't an immediate hate. Rather, it was a slowly simmering one as a result of a string of severely underwhelming and/or miscalculated decisions, culminating in me finally mentally throwing up my hands in an "I give up!" fashion. But let me start with the positives: this movie absolutely does look great. In terms of visuals and production design, Tim Burton has still got it, and if there's any aspect of this movie where it/he feels particularly inspired, it's in the aesthetic and production design. Concurrently, it feels like the world of the dead here gets to be explored a bit more in the first and if anything, I appreciated that. Also on the subject of the visuals, the movie has more than a fair few that surprise me -- in a good way -- that they somehow still got away with a PG-13 rating. So, on a visual level, I do believe Burton when he said he had a blast making this. That extends, too, to Michael Keaton's performance as the titular Ghost with the Most. Keaton is hands down one of the liveliest things here -- as expected -- clearly reveling in the opportunity to play this character again and consistently delivering the film's biggest laughs as a result. Right there with him in that regard is Catherine O'Hara as Delia. Too bad the rest of the movie lets them down.

Because this script really is pretty terrible. For one thing, it spends about half (maybe more) of its 105-minute running time setting up what the actual plot of the movie is, which would be one thing if that setup were any good, but it's not. Instead, it feels so belabored, forced, strained, trying-too-hard, with characterizations that ring hollow and/or too cartoonish, performances that simply feel off and worst of all, comedy that largely lands with a thud. And when one of the main genres here is comedy, that's a problem. Because, again, apart from Keaton and O'Hara, pretty much the rest of the humor here failed to get any true laughs out of me. It's not for lack of trying, but there are few things worse than a comedy going for laughs and missing the mark more often than not, and that's the case here. It's not just that, though. One of the things that made the first Beelejuice work so well is how it hung all its creativity around a charmingly simple story. This sequel, by contrast, simply feels too busy. There are so many threads going on here at the same time, that the movie hardly ever feels like it has time to breathe, being driven more solely by plot machinations rather than letting the charm of the characters help keep things steady, i.e. having its equivalent of The Maitlands to keep everything relatively grounded. And on the subject of the characters...a lot of this movie is centered around a strained relationship between Lydia and her daughter Astrid, but Winona Ryder's performance feels like she's almost overly medicated and Jenna Ortega's comes across like reheated leftovers of the Wednesday show. Lydia also feels kind of dumbed down in this. The movie offers an explanation as to why she could possibly be like this, but the intended emotion of it simply doesn't come across. I think that's due to a combination of lackluster writing and Tim Burton perhaps having lost his touch a bit in terms of directing his actors. Another thing that lands with a deafening thud, by the way? This movie's try at creating its own "Day-Oh!" possessed dance sequence. I had already conceded defeat in regards to this movie by then, but that sequence wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back -- more like the straw that caved the bones in. And I haven't even mentioned Justin Thereoux's painfully bad performance, nor the complete pointlessness of Monica Bellucci's character, but -- they're there.

Overall, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice feels like an extended, live-action episode of the 90's animated series, but not in a good way. There's very much such a thing as having too much of a good thing, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice painfully proves that point.

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