A Worthy Successor Once It Ditches Exposition for Gonzo Weird Shit
So, to be fair, this movie doesn’t need to exist. And, frankly, for the first half of its runtime, it seems to prove that, with a lot of bloated and protracted exposition to catch us up with characters we haven’t seen in 40 years.
But then Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice is let off the leash down the back half, and the gonzo glory of the original is rediscovered. And suddenly I want them to keep making Beetlejuice movies forever.
Besides a wild, Spanish flashback that gives us some semblance of a Beetlejuice origin story, the first half didn’t provide a ton of the shenanigans folks are probably looking in a Beetlejuice movie. But when Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega, and Catherine O’Hara head to the afterlife with Keatons titular demon, we get shenanigans galore, complete with a literal Soul Train, Willem Dafoe as an afterlife cliche cop, and an absolutely killer musical sequence that is an awesome successor to Harry Belafontes legendary scene in the first one.
Ultimately, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” warrants its own existence with some serious imaginative tomfoolery, and I’d be down to get another and see Keaton get a goddamn Oscar nomination.