“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ”Review: Michael Keaton Is Fit to Raise the Dead (Again!) in a Fun but Uneven Sequel

Wynona Rider and Catherine O'Hara, costars in director Tim Burton's 1988 original, are back too

The legend is that you conjure Beetlejuice, the gag-loving, demonic and arguably demented ghost, by saying his name thrice — though the title of director Tim Burton’s sequel to his career-making 1988 makes do with twice.

But you always have the option of not saying his name that many times. Or at all. You can even start out saying “Beetlejuice” and change midstream to, say, “—mania.”

In other words, you can easily spare yourself this highly anticipated movie, an elaborate but very uneven retread that recycles many of the best elements from the first Beetlejuice, including a variation on the great "Day-O" lip-syncing number. (Here the song is the sublimely illogical “MacArthur Park,” complete with its famous cake, gray as a tombstone, melting in the rain falling from a tiny cloud.)

But the surprise and delight are gone. Beetlejuice 1 had an exciting, surreal strangeness, thanks to the originality of Burton’s perverse Gothic humor and the unsettling performance by a manic, growling  Michael Keaton, made up to look something like a dead possum in prison stripes.

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Keaton is still funny, and manic, and growling, but not unsettling — not something to tug at your unconscious in your dreams or your waking hours. You can almost take his grotesque vaudevillian enthusiasm for granted. It’s as if Pennywise from It had spent too many nights honing his standup routine for a Netflix special.

The film’s plot is an unnecessarily loose bag of bones, some of them inspired, some less so.

On earth, Lydia Deetz (Winona Rider) has grown up to be the host of a reality program called Ghost Town, while her mother (Catherine O’Hara) is mourning the loss of her husband. His remains are now walking around in the underworld, his upper torso missing and blood gurgling around in his exposed innards whenever he tries to talk. (He was chomped in half by a shark).

Down below you'll also find a corpse that’s been hacked to pieces and stored in boxes — this would have been a great product-placement spot for the Container Store — who reassembles herself with a staple gun, limb by limb: The result is a gorgeous spirit, deadly as nightshade, named Dolores, who happens to be Beetlejuice’s ex-wife.

She’s played by Monica Bellucci with enough slithering glamour that you wish she’d been given more time on screen. Mostly, she inhales the life from her victims, leaving them to collapse into a rubbery heap, like an inflatable mattress with a puncture. It's not much more than a good party trick.

Then there's Willem Dafoe as a former actor, Wolf Jackson, now dead and with a large chunk of his skull exposed, who serves as the ghouls’ force for law-and-order. He barks out orders and chomps down on his words as if they were sandwich meat.

Meanwhile, Beetlejuice seems to have earned his own C-suite in the afterlife, attended to by a retinue of suited, square-shouldered men with shrunken heads (including Bob from Beetlejuice 1). Of course, he’ll soon be summoned back to the realm of the living, where (as always) he’ll manage to seem more alive than anyone else.

None of this would have been out of place in Beetlejuice 1, and maybe that’s the problem.

Beetlejuice 2 doesn’t build on the first film or take Burton any further as a director. One of the most original movie-makers of his generation, he’s given 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 has also perhaps made it less distinctive in the long run, or at least less startling in its frequent touches of death-haunted beauty. He could be the Edgar Allan Poe of American cinema.

The most magical, Burtonesque image here is of those shrunken-headed minions, dressed in marigold suits and running around at night like Frankensteins rampaging down a runway. Both menacing and enchanting, they’re almost enough to make you chant “Beetlejuice!" three times. Maybe more.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in theaters Sept. 6.

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