Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
Much to Hollywood’s relief, the summer box office made a sustained rebound that could indicate the public isn’t quite ready to abandon moviegoing as a national pastime. But considering that 8 of the summer’s top 10 movies are the latest installments of long-in-the-tooth franchises, how long it can stand this ground should be the industry’s most pressing concern. The quality of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Inside Out 2, and Twisters notwithstanding, one can’t shake that they are all, in part, eulogies for a time long past when the movies had an interest in fresh worlds and a respect for their audiences as something more than mindless IP consumers.
Timed to take full advantage of the long Halloween season and its endless merchandising opportunities, the long-gestating Beetlejuice Beetlejuice may be nostalgia bait that reunites Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O’Hara while bringing unrivaled Gen Z scream queen Jenna Ortega into the mix for some lucrative torch passing. But director Tim Burton is gleefully in on the joke, the mastermind of this glorious blockbuster valentine to the underworld steeped in gorgeously disgusting practical effects that reminds us all of what we’ve lost in the current moviegoing climate.
Today, no Hollywood studio would bankroll a wide-release movie as unhinged and subversive as 1988’s Beetlejuice, the film that established Burton as a Hollywood visionary and made his Neo-Gothic style a cottage industry. From Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns to his unfairly maligned live-action Dumbo, he has remained one of the American cinema’s most singular satirists even if the Disneyfication of his aesthetic has diminished his pop-culture cachet.
Like its predecessor, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finds humor in an all-encompassing bureaucracy one cannot escape even in death. But, this go around, Burton also takes aim at the activist bromides and art world pretensions that our betters use to fleece us as we distract ourselves with the type of exploitative ghost hunting shows that Ryder’s once rebellious Lydia Deetz finds herself hosting. As the object of Burton’s ire, Justin Theroux’s baby-man-bunned B-list Hollywood skeez proves both the perfect sparring partner for Keaton and the epitome of the White Dudes for Harris posturing the Right wished they thought of.
Somehow, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice manages to be everything to everyone: a gut-busting sequel that’s worthy of its predecessor, a throwback to a better time, an effective multigenerational family saga, a treatise on broken marriages, and a rejoinder to the Hollywood pandering that has alienated a large swath of former moviegoers. But it’s also the work of a filmmaker who’s rediscovered his powers at a time when Hollywood has no interest in finding anyone else to succeed him as it inches ever closer to needing its own Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opens tonight in theaters.