Legend has it that you summon Beetlejuice, a demonic and arguably demented ghost who loves gags, by saying his name three times – although the title of director Tim Burton’s 1988 follow-up to his career satisfied him twice.
But you always have the option not saying his name so many times. Or at all. You can even start with “Beetlejuice” and change the midflow to, say, “-mania.”
In other words, you can easily spare yourself this long-awaited film, an elaborate but very uneven remake that recycles many of the best elements from the first bug juice, including a lip sync variation of the great “Day-O” number. (Here the song is the sublimely illogical “MacArthur Park,” complete with its famous tombstone-gray cake, melting in the rain falling from a tiny cloud.)
But the surprise and delight were gone. Beetle juice 1 it had an exciting, surreal strangeness to it, thanks to the originality of Burton’s perverse gothic humor and the disturbing performance of a manic, snarling Michael Keaton, made up to look like a dead possum in prison stripes.
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Keaton is still funny, and manic, and snarling, but not unsettling – not something to pull you unconscious in your dreams or your waking hours. You can almost take his grotesque vaudeville enthusiasm for granted. As if Pennywise is from It he’s spent too many nights honing his stand-up routine for a Netflix special.
The film’s plot is an unnecessarily loose bag of bones, some of them inspired, some less so.
Ryder with costar Justin Theroux.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
On earth, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) grew up and became the host of a reality show called ghost town, while her mother (Catherine O’Hara) mourns the loss of her husband. His remains now walk underground, his upper torso missing, blood bubbling in his exposed entrails whenever he tries to speak. (The shark cut it in half).
Downstairs you’ll also find a corpse that’s been chopped up and stored in boxes — this would be a great product placement for the Container Store — being reassembled with a staple gun, limb by limb: the result is a beautiful spirit, as deadly as a nightshade, by name Delores, who happens to be Beetlejuice’s ex-wife.
She is played by Monica Bellucci with enough glamor to make you wish she had more screen time. It mostly breathes life into its victims, leaving them to collapse into a rubbery heap, like a punctured air mattress. It’s nothing more than a good fun trick.
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Monica Bellucci as a badass, badass vampire.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Then there’s Willem Dafoe as the former actor, Wolf Jackson, now dead and with much of his skull exposed, who serves as a ghost force for law and order. He mouths orders and bites his words like they’re sandwich meat.
Meanwhile, Beetlejuice appears to have been given his own C-Suite in the afterlife, accompanied by a retinue of suit-wearing, square-shouldered, shrunken-headed men (including Bob from Beetlejuice 1). Of course, he’ll soon be called back to the realm of the living, where (as always) he’ll manage to seem more alive than anyone else.
None of this would be out of place Beetlejuice 1, and maybe that’s the problem.
Beetle juice 2 it doesn’t build on the first film or take Burton further as a director. One of the most original film directors of his generation, he gave us at least three classics — Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns and Sweeney Todd — and impressive oddities like Ed Woods, Sleepy Hollow and Big Eyes.
But the success of his sensibility may also have made him less distinctive in the long run, or at least less startling in his frequent touches of death-haunted beauty. He could be the Edgar Allan Poe of American cinema.
The most magical, Burtonian image here is those marigold-clad, marigold-suited darlings running around at night like Frankensteins rampaging down the runway. Both menacing and mesmerizing, they’re almost enough to make you sing “Beetlejuice!” three times. Maybe even more.Beetlejuice Beetlejuice it’s in theaters on September 6.
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Source: HIS Education