Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a major Lydia Deetz problem

There’s a complete lot occurring in Tim Burton’s sequel to his 1988 hit Beetlejuice. Burton and his writers convey again a number of the authentic characters for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and introduce loads of new ones, then cram all of them collectively in half a dozen distracted, incomplete plot traces. Not one of the characters, new or outdated, get any room to breathe or assert themselves in a manner that might resonate the best way the unique film did.

Monica Bellucci because the movie’s supposed villain barely will get greater than an introduction and a send-off. In his return as undead, lecherous chaos monkey Betelgeuse, Michael Keaton will get just a few brief set-pieces, however feels virtually like a background character in his personal film. Nonetheless, the sequel’s most tragic sufferer is poor misplaced Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the gothic-teen heroine of the primary film, the supposed central determine within the sequel, and the most important wasted alternative in the entire messy deal.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is frustratingly brief on new concepts. There are just a few promising threads, like Lydia’s mutually irritating estrangement from her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and Astrid’s soulful reference to a neighborhood boy, Jeremy (Arthur Conti), who appears blissfully regular in comparison with Astrid’s numerous bizarre blood relations and their hangers-on. (It’s no shock that he’s as much as no good: By no means belief anybody in a Tim Burton film whose entire model is “I’m the traditional one.”)

None of those half-developed storylines come to something, although, amid all of the callbacks to the unique film, which vary from recycled designs and let’s-just-do-the-exact-same-thing-again visible gags proper all the way down to wholesale lifting Beetlejuice’s ending for the brand new film. And that exasperating lack of creativity, innovation, or iteration within the sequel is at its absolute worst in relation to Lydia.

Within the 1988 film, Lydia is a traditional Burton oddball, an outsider who doesn’t match into the mainstream and doesn’t essentially need to. She’s additionally an angsty teenager. However she modifies rather a lot over the course of the film, discovering confidence and pleasure in life, and seemingly coming to phrases with the world. So it’s odd to see how she reverts to that angsty-teen model of her character within the new film. Thirty years later, she’s had a associate, a toddler, and a profession, however she feels just like the Lydia from the primary movie’s opening act, snipped out of that story and dropped into this one. Ryder performs her with the identical fastened, strained exasperation she had in 1988, plus just a little extra angst — however the true drawback is the script, which provides her just about nothing to work with.

When Beetlejuice Beetlejuice begins, Lydia is a well-liked TV medium starring in a ghost-chasing sequence that monetizes her not-always-welcome means to see and speak to the useless. She’s nonetheless traumatized by her teenage encounter with Betelgeuse, experiencing frequent flashbacks and nightmares. Her teenage daughter Astrid hates her, for causes that learn like somebody cross-wired a few completely different script drafts: Astrid doesn’t imagine ghosts are actual, and appears to suppose her mother is making up supernatural encounters for consideration and cash. However she’s additionally indignant at Lydia for not discovering and speaking with the spirit of Astrid’s father, who disappeared within the Amazon and may not even be useless.

The clearest indication of how halfhearted this film is about its human aspect is that there’s barely a touch of who Lydia truly is as an grownup, or why she does any of the issues she does. Her character is written erratically and inconsistently: Over the course of just some minutes within the early going of the film, she treats ghosts as a daunting problem, a boring workaday inconvenience, and a lifelong trauma. Astrid means that Lydia uncared for and deserted her with a view to pursue a TV profession, however it’s by no means clear whether or not that’s true, how Lydia feels in regards to the accusation, or whether or not she has any ideas about her present and her ghost-chasing fame in any respect.

There is likely to be a method to reconcile all these responses if Burton and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville, Wednesday) gave the viewers even the slightest sense of how Lydia feels about her profession. Is her present a put-on, or does she truly care in regards to the plight of the ghosts she’s confronting or the haunted-house homeowners she’s comforting? Is she cynically exploiting the afterlife for revenue, or being exploited by her supervisor Rory (Justin Theroux)? Is she making an attempt to save lots of folks from the issues she went via as a teen? Is she a crusader, a savior, a sufferer, or simply somebody capitalizing on a fad and commodifying her expertise? We don’t know, as a result of Burton can’t spare 30 seconds to let Lydia specific something that isn’t instantly reactive to some little bit of comedy folderol round her.

The primary Beetlejuice has Lydia as a bored, annoyed teenager who’s simply as estranged from her mom, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), as Astrid is from Lydia within the new film. By the point of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Lydia and Delia appear to be on good phrases, even able to supporting and listening to one another. A model of this story that was truly keen on creating any of those characters would have lots to attract on in Delia’s insights into coping with a annoyed, rebellious teenager, or Lydia’s reminiscences of the way it felt to be that teenager.

Both of these issues would give both of those ladies one thing to speak about, with one another or with Astrid — and loads of motive to a minimum of acknowledge the connection as they’re operating across the underworld having adventures. If nothing else, there’d be some pathos in the best way Lydia’s incapacity to attach with Astrid mirrors her personal struggles with Delia — if that had been ever acknowledged, if any of those characters had been being handled like folks as an alternative of props in a sequence of hyper hijinks.

And once more, it isn’t that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ought to have been a Tracy Letts stage play, with characters responding to disaster by loudly figuring out all their generational trauma. However have a look at any actually memorable, emotionally efficient comedy from the final 20 years, and also you’ll in all probability discover that the screenwriters did the work of turning the characters into folks as an alternative of caricatures, of giving them methods to narrate to one another and join to one another, or a minimum of present just a little actual emotion. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice squanders each alternative for that. And it ought to have began with somebody, sooner or later, deciding who the protagonist of this film truly is, whether or not she’s ever made a significant alternative in her life, and whether or not the final 30 years have had any actual impact on her in any respect.