Movie Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) · 4:20am September 27th
Watched this one today with my dad. It was fun, I am glad to have been in the theater for it. 
It's a very smart sequel in a lot of ways. For one thing, it doesn't just repeat plot beats from the original movie. It's great to see Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara and Michael Keaton again (Keaton in particular - he perfectly captures the crude, chaotic persona of the "Ghost with the Most" as if it were yesterday!), but the movie has a very clever through line, and a very different one from the 1988 film.
If there's a central theme to this movie, I'd sum it up as "toxic romance". The plot of the movie is surprisingly involved - plot beats involving Lydia Deetz (Ryder), her near-estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), as well as Lydia's stepmother Delia (O'Hara) crash into the ghost-world plot with Betelgeuse (Keaton) trying to outrun his undead ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci) with almost wild abandon, but that core thread of destructive, false love keeps everything connected, and kept me engaged with how things would play out.
(It's popular to claim that Tim Burton can't do narrative. I think that's BS, particularly given the way that this movie ties together its plot points through the actions of each of the major characters.)
The returning actors are lots of fun, but let's not count out the new talent either. Jenna Ortega walks a fine line as Astrid, being troubled without becoming hateworthy. Bellucci is wicked in solid aristocratic, vampiric form as the soul-sucking Delores. And Justin Theroux is delightfully slimy as a sleazy, gold-digging manager to Lydia. Willem Dafoe gets to ham it up very entertainingly as a Clint Eastwood parody; his character's "gritty cop" antics as the head of the netherworld's police department brings some good laughs. 
Though that being said, the MVP of this one is still Keaton. He headlines two of the movie's most ghoulishly inspired sequences - one a manically over the top black-and-white Gothic flashback to Betelgeuse's origin (narrated in Italian, no less!); and the other a show-stopping musical number using, of all possible songs, "MacArthur Park" to create as many laughs as could be wrung out of a mass possession. 
(And here I thought that "Banana Boat" was the wildest choice for a song in a haunted house movie!)
All in all, a good return to form for Tim Burton. And after the shellacking his body of work, and his reputation, have taken in the intervening years, I am most relieved to see him get a win once more. 
Glad you had fun with the movie
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I am glad to have seen it, especially as I was kinda on the fence about whether or not to go at all, but yeah, in the end I am very glad to have gone to the theater with Dad for this. ^_^
Thanks, Four.