Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Catherine O’hara, Monica Bellucci, and Willem Dafoe.

Director: Tim Burton

What’s Good: Tim Burton’s visual style remains unique, even when many have tried vainly to copy it.

What’s Bad: The pacing of the first half is absolutely glacial, and what should feel like 100 minutes feels like a movie running over two hours.

Loo Break: The first half of the film allows for many breaks, as not all the scenes are pivotal for understanding everything happening.

Watch or Not?: If you love Tim Burton or Jenna Ortega, this is a must, or even if you’re just looking for something light to watch.

Language: English (with subtitles).

Available On: Theaters

Runtime: 105 Minutes

User Rating:

Opening:

Tim Burton’s body of work is pretty unique, as the director has gone through several phases of success and failure but never failed to stay loyal to the look and feel that made him a household name in the first place. This time, with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the legacy sequel to one of his first cult hits, the director tries to bring back the energy and visual prowess that has abandoned him in the last decade, bringing with him his usual suspects like Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, alongside his new muse, Jenna Ortega.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Movie Review: Script Analysis

If there is a big problem with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is its structure, the film takes just too much time to properly start developing characters and setting up things that will eventually pay off in the end; classic screenwriting structures are there for a reason, and while they can feel mechanic at times, some other times it is good just to follow them and mix it up with your own ideas on how the story should develop.

As it is, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does very little in the first half to set things in motion, and it feels like it takes too much time to catch us up with what the characters were doing in the last three decades. Catching up with characters could be good in any other film, but in this one, it only feels like the movie is stretching itself up for no reason. Screenwriting should be lean and mean more often than not, but here we have too many characters and, therefore, too many subplots that only work to make the movie longer but not more interesting or charming; we only care about our main characters; the rest feel like filler.

The script does have some good jokes, and thanks to the solid performances, some jokes land better than they should. The overall plot also feels like a story worth telling in this day and age, but also feels like maybe it should have been told in another movie and not in a film about a weird diary ghost. The message does land, and by the end, the film fits well alongside Burton’s body of work.

However, it would be disingenuous to say that this movie, like many other sequels released recently, doesn’t justify its existence and feels like a movie made just for the recognizable title and the talent attached to it. There are too many films like that, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is just one of them. As it is, the film falls into too many trappings and leaves us with a story with something to say but also meanders too much while saying it.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Movie Review: Star Performance

The script and the story might be relatively weak and flawed, but the performances are quite good, especially those from Jenna Ortega and Winona Ryder, who seem to grab the movie by the horns and make it all about their own. Meanwhile, Michael Keaton, who plays the character that gives the film its name, feels relatively weak in comparison, and it might be that this is just a paycheck gig for him. It is rather nice to see Keaton returning for the role, which gives the film the sense that everyone wanted to do their best at it.

The presence of Bellucci and Dafoe also brings a small element of refinement to the entire cast, and while there could have been so much more from their characters, they do make an impression.