2024-09-06 10:19:26
He’s still here. Somewhere in the corner of your vision. Lydia Deetz is no longer a teenage member of the gothic subculture, she is no longer frightened not only by ghosts, but mainly by the strange demonic exorcist Beetlejuice in Tim Burton’s horror comedy of the same name.
The film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is showing in Czech cinemas from this Thursday. Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh | Video: Vertical Entertainment
In the sequel called Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which will be shown in Czech cinemas from Thursday, Lydia has her own TV show where she deals with ghosts on a regular basis. Then the striped black and white weirdo with the panda face re-enters her life after serving a life sentence.
With the 1988 film about how Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, as the Deetz couple, buy a haunted house, Tim Burton made a significant entry into the history of cinema for the first time. It was a live-action film, but it was shot with crazy energy and the aesthetics of an animated musical grotesque, albeit a slightly gloomy one. The poetics of the director’s top achievements such as Batman Returns or Edward Scissorhands were already born here.
In the 1990s, Burton made eccentric and colorful works, at the same time overflowing with unusual sadness. But in the last two decades, this mixture has seriously disappeared from his work. The circus remained, but not nearly as impressive as the clowns.
His versions of Alice in Wonderland from 2010 or the most recent, five-year-old Dumbo have forgotten the poetics of former animated Disney films. It’s as if Burton has become some kind of slightly jaded maintenance worker at Disney’s dream factory. Quite a skilled craftsman, but instead of a live-action version of the lyrical cartoon Dumbo from the 1940s, he offered a modern audience a spectacle that drastically departed from the original without coming up with something of its own.
Now Burton returns to the original, but this time his own. Did he find the right path? The image of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a certain contagiousness in it. And it also has actors Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton, who reprized their original roles.
Jenna Ortega (left) as teenage Astrid can’t stand her mother Lydia, played by Winona Ryder. | Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh
They are joined by, among others, Monica Bellucci as a very morbid bride from the grave, Willem Dafoe in the role of a kind of parody of a tough noir policeman or Jenna Ortega as Lydia’s teenage daughter who cannot stand her mother – probably because they are so similar.
In this somewhat belated sequel, the director casually tosses around ideas, dressing the original handmade aesthetic in a more modern but not sterile digital guise. And the confrontation of mortals with the grave certainly does not lack energy.
An eccentric family returns to a house haunted by two deaths. Since then, the grandfather survived the plane crash, but not the shark attack, which deprived him of a relatively essential part of the upper half of his body. Which with Tim Burton is not necessarily a reason for the character to stop appearing in the story. In the same way, it is not surprising for this author that there may not be a big difference between a funeral and a wedding.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a pleasantly quirky work for young people rather than for Burton nostalgics, although the creator tries to throw familiar things from the original to the fans, but he can’t.
On the contrary, most of the added characters and their related subplots seem like cute but unnecessary gimmicks, however it can be fun for a while to watch Monica Bellucci assemble into a whole from her many parts, or Willem Dafoe, who plays something between Harry Potter and Robocop.
It’s nice to see a talented filmmaker who was once labeled a visionary still able to find his inner fire. The only question is, for what reasons he ignited it.
Tim Burton has moved from a tired maintenance man from Disney to the role of a slightly more vital maintenance man of his own universe. He definitely no longer has the energy to make a sequel that surpasses the first part – as he once did with the film Batman Returns, where he turned famous comic book heroes into actors in difficult fables about animals and people, where the only sentence “Do we dance or fight?” between Batman and Catwoman managed to unsettle and charm the audience.
True, this time he is following up on a project where he was still searching a bit as an author. But continuing that search 36 years later doesn’t seem like the happiest of ideas. His fans will get a good reason to put on their black and white striped uniforms and shout “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice”. But Burton plays it too safe.
Although the 73-year-old Michael Keaton in the role of Beetlejuice gives a manic performance, which seems to defy his age and become a protagonist from the grave himself for a while, Winona Ryder is still great here and the list of visual and other small things could go on. Although the film is full of ghosts, it lacks a spirit of its own. It stayed with a series of gags and pokes at what attracted viewers to the original film. His explosive mix of genres and pop culture is no longer as innovative as it was at the end of the 80s.
Film
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Directed by: Tim Burton
Vertical Entertainment, Czech premiere on September 5.