Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the bottom of the barrel.

The second that multinational billion-dollar corporations began to consume film studios and treated the film industry like a tab in a portfolio rather than an actual studio,  the modern film industry was inevitable.

Warner Brothers has been trying to fast track a sequel to the cult classic Beetlejuice since 1988. I can’t explain how we got from 1988 to 2023 in less than 30 minutes, but here’s a cliff notes version of the event.  Warner Bros wanted to do a sequel in Hawaii, but they ended up losing the rights to the script to another Studio that sat on it for well over a decade, half the people who were responsible for the script died, The project was revived and killed multiple times in the 2010s, and by the time it was all said and done super Mexican actress Jenna Ortega was cast to be the daughter of super Jewish actress when Winona Ryder and Warner Brothers decided to invest 100 million dollars by making these two characters the focal point of the latest film entitled ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.’

Thirty-six years after the first film, Lydia Deetz, played by Ryder, now hosts a supernatural talk show called Ghost House, produced by her boyfriend Rory. During the taping of a segment, Lydia sees visions of the ghost Betelgeuse in the audience and begins to panic that the demon she left almost 4 decades in the past is back.

As Lydia deals with a broken relationship with her daughter Astrid and her father’s death, in the afterlife, the ex-wife of Beetlejuice Delores is back from the grave to take the soul of her former husband. This puts Beetlejuice in a bind of having to ask Lydia for her help to get out of his jam but he still has a Scheme to get out of the afterworld by using Lydia to get out.

If a film takes 36 years to come to fruition, you should have counted your losses and gotten out while you were ahead. Beetlejuice 2 Is a disjointed mess of a movie. It is a film that has so many subplots that aren’t developed half of them are given up on throughout the movie that by the time the end credits roll you realize that half of the characters in this film could have been cut out completely and it would not have changed the direction of the film.

Let’s start with Jeffrey Jones, who played Lydia’s father in the original film.  Jeffrey didn’t return for the sequel because the world knows that he is a convicted pedophile Who was charged with assaulting a 14-year-old boy who he then forced to provide child pornography. Jeffrey himself isn’t in the movie,  The likeness of his character remains an integral part of the storyline almost as if the filmmakers wanted people to forget why it is they’re not allowed to bring him back for this film.

Most of the characters don’t serve a purpose to the film. Monica Bellucci was sold to audiences to be the antagonist of the movie and the main threat of the film however outside of her initial introduction her character completely disappears for large stretches to the point where you begin to wonder what was even her purpose being in the film.

All the characters in the movie, including our title character don’t have much of a presence in this film, meaning audiences won’t find out until much later that this sequel bait-and-switch to focus on the relationship between Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega. Winona Ryder who looks completely ridiculous as a 53-year-old woman who dresses exactly like her 17-year-old counterpart  Simply cannot match the character presence that she had in 1988.

Story-wise the film is centered around Lydia’s broken relationship with her daughter Astrid who hates her mother because she would rather spend more time on her television show than with her.  Ortega’s character is a young girl who misses being a social justice protester with her father as he died in an unrelated incident before the film but later comes back around in the second act.

Why creatively they decided to break up their family before they established them with the audience only to have Lydia’s character run around with a glorified stooge whose only contribution to the film is weak comic relief can only be explained as a complete lack of creative direction across the board.

The pacing in the editing of this film is abysmal,  despite early rumors that the film was scheduled to be longer than the final cut released into theaters,  Beetlejuice 2 still manages to drag the audience along for 105 minutes and you will feel every single second. The charm of Tim Burton has been long past due for a while now. The selling point of this movie is essentially trying to drum up as many member berries from Generation X using Tim Burton cinematography and Michael Keaton’s throwback charm to ignore all the obvious flaws in the movie.

Meanwhile, use Jenna Ortega’s popularity from Wednesday to sweep in Gen Z  along the way. But in reality, this is all just window dressing to distract that none of the characters in this movie get enough screen time to have any impact worthwhile. Because the end does not justify the means for this project audiences are going to be left with its empty attempt at nostalgia baiting people within the AARP age to jingle the keys of their teenage years so that they can convince themselves that this film was worth the 36th year wait.

Like many modern-day Hollywood sequels,  ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ only accomplishes one goal, to make you want to watch the original film that was far superior to whatever the hell the creative minds at one of the brothers thought this film was going to be.

1/5 

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