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Five years ago this wouldn’t have been a thing. Too much time had passed since the first film so no one would have really pushed for a sequel. In fact it tried to be a thing for a long time and as more and more years went by it all seemed less and less likely. Then legacy sequels hit big and it all changed; suddenly a Beetlejuice sequel was an inevitability. There are so many of these belated follow ups now that legacy sequels aren’t really a thing themselves anymore, you might as well talk about regular sequels being a Hollywood trend. It has just become normal.

Like a number of these, let’s call them delayed continuations, there is an element of this being a remake of the original. You need a bit of time between films to be able to get away with this but it can work and in this case it mostly does. Interestingly Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice feels to some extent like a remake of another Tim Burton movie too, and a live action remake at that so Keaton’s ghost with the most is back, riding all sorts of cinematic trends.

As well as riffing on Burton’s calling card film then, with the familiar cartoonish high jinks of its title character and the extended scenes of a grinding underworld bureaucracy, this also replays ideas from 2005’s stop motion movie Corpse Bride, with the living visiting the land of dead and some key scenes happening in a church.

Essentially what this means is that this is Tim Burton once again working at his purest. I’m not saying this is immediately something to sing about, as a director some of his best work has come when he has laid his distinct sensibilities over existing stories as with Batman and Sweeney Todd (some of his worst too, see Mars Attacks and Dumbo), but it does carry that dark charm that no one else can emulate.

There is no denying that Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is a lot of fun. I wouldn’t call it essential cinema but there is much here to enjoy. Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara and Jenna Ortega are all having a lot of fun for sure and it is infectious. To be fair all of the cast are having a great time here. Willem Defoe gleefully plays detective and Monica Bellucci, while perhaps being style over substance, does have such great style as a vampy version of The Nightmare Before Christmas’ Sally (there are heavy shades of that movie here too, which was probably the most Burtonesque of all of his films, even if he didn’t direct it himself). 1988’s Beetlejuice was largely carried by a young Winona Ryder of course and she’s clearly enjoying being in this one too. She certainly picks up on Lydia thirty five years on very effectively but her performance most reminded me that time she stood behind David Harbour pulling funny faces when Stranger Things won big at the SAG Awards. There is lots of confused frowning and raised eyebrows here as well.

The other stars of the original were Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin but their failure to appear again is waved away quickly with someone responding with the knowing line ‘that’s convenient’. To be honest a lot of the plot here is dealt with or resolved conveniently. There are a lot of story threads and they don’t all get satisfactory resolutions. The one thing they don’t brush aside though is Jeffrey Jones having been in the first film. I thought they might want to distance this from him completely following his conviction as a sex offender in 2022 but they don’t. They clearly haven’t got him to reprise his role but the character does feature and his likeness is in the film. One of the ways they bring him back without bringing him back is an effective running gag but the other way is through a slightly jarring animated sequence which knowing the actor’s history feels forced. Incidentally, composer Danny Elfman’s sexual assault case was dismissed so he is back properly and what ever else he has done in his life his new score for this is something to be celebrated.

Unsurprisingly Betelgeuse’s own perverted nature is dialled down from last time. He is still a creep though and there is a sequence involving forced pregnancy that doesn’t sit very easily. I know this is playing on a horror trope from films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen and Immaculate but those movies properly address this as an abhorrent example of men trying to control and claim women’s bodies but here it is used as a sight gag. There are lots of good female characters here, if anything it is lead by them, but this might have undermined for me this just a little.

In the end Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice showcases both what has been strong and weak about Tim Burton’s forty year career as a filmmaker. The distinct design and imagination is strong and the performances compelling but too often this disguises a rushed story and incomplete characterisation. As a director he has made some great movies and some poor ones and this sits where a lot of his work does; somewhere in the middle.