Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Tim Burton made a sequel to Beetlejuice 36 years after the original, and the result is exactly what you'd expect from a director who has been coasting on his own aesthetic for at least a decade: a film that looks like a Tim Burton movie, sounds like a Tim Burton movie, and delivers about 60% of the joy of a Tim Burton movie. The Beetlejuice scenes work. Everything around them is a mixed bag of nostalgia, generational comedy, and progressive family dynamics that never quite gel.

Charles Deetz has died off-screen in a plane crash (the film gives him an absurd shark-related send-off in the afterlife). Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) has become the host of a ghost-hunting TV show called "Ghost House," a clear parody of paranormal reality television. She's dating Rory (Justin Theroux), her producer and manager, who is transparently a con man. Her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) is a cynical, science-minded teenager who resents her mother's belief in the supernatural and her grandmother Delia's (Catherine O'Hara) avant-garde art nonsense.

The Deetz family returns to Winter River, Connecticut for Charles's memorial. Astrid meets Jeremy (also a ghost, though she doesn't know it yet), and through a series of events, gets pulled into the afterlife. Lydia is forced to summon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) for help. Beetlejuice, still obsessed with marrying Lydia, agrees to rescue Astrid in exchange for Lydia's hand. Meanwhile, Beetlejuice's ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), a soul-consuming entity, is stalking him through the afterlife for revenge.

The afterlife sequences are the film's strongest material. Burton's imagination fires on all cylinders in the bureaucratic underworld. The practical effects are genuinely impressive in an era of CGI saturation. Michael Keaton's performance is as manic and funny as it was in 1988. Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson, a dead action-movie star who now plays an afterlife detective, is an inspired comic creation.

The living-world material is weaker. The Rory con-man subplot is predictable and wastes Justin Theroux. Astrid's romance with Jeremy has a genuine emotional beat but is undercooked. The generational conflict between Lydia and Astrid, which should be the film's heart, never achieves the depth it needs because the script keeps cutting away to afterlife slapstick.

Trope Analysis -- VVWS Weighted Scoring

Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity (1-5)	Authenticity	Centrality	Weighted Score
Patriarch eliminated, Charles Deetz killed off to center female family dynamic	3	Low, feels like a writing convenience	Central	4.2
Male romantic interest (Rory) as fraud and predator, coded as a critique of patriarchal exploitation	3	Moderate	Moderate	3.0
Gen Z daughter as the rational corrective to her mother's beliefs, generational superiority coding	2	Moderate	Moderate	2.0
Delia's feminist art treated as both joke and valid self-expression	2	High, consistent with her character	Supporting	1.4
All-female family unit as emotional center with no positive male figures among the living	2	Moderate	Central	2.5
Soul Drain subplot, Delores framed as wronged ex-wife seeking justified revenge	2	Moderate	Supporting	2.0
WOKE TOTAL	15.1

Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity (1-5)	Authenticity	Centrality	Weighted Score
Mother-daughter reconciliation, Lydia and Astrid finding common ground	3	High	Central	3.8
Practical craftsmanship, Burton's commitment to practical effects over CGI	3	High	Supporting	2.1
Con man exposed and punished, Rory gets his comeuppance	2	High	Supporting	1.4
Nostalgia as genuine cultural value, the original's spirit honored	2	Moderate	Supporting	1.4
Afterlife has rules and consequences, moral universe with structure	2	High	Supporting	1.4
Marriage as binding contract, even in the afterlife (played for comedy but taken seriously by the plot)	2	Moderate	Supporting	1.4
TRAD TOTAL	11.5

Director Ideological Track Record

Tim Burton's career is a case study in how aesthetic identity maps onto ideological sympathy. His films consistently side with outcasts, misfits, and weirdos against conformist society. This is a progressive instinct, but Burton's execution has historically been more personal than political:

• Edward Scissorhands (1990): Outsider vs. suburbia. The suburbs are conformist and cruel. This reads progressive, but Burton's target is human cruelty in general, not a specific political system.
• Ed Wood (1994): A celebration of passion over competence. Ed Wood is terrible at filmmaking and magnificent at caring about it. No political content.
• Sweeney Todd (2007): Class-based revenge fantasy set in Victorian London. Mildly progressive in its sympathy for the dispossessed.
• Big Eyes (2014): Based on a true story of a woman whose husband stole credit for her art. Straightforward feminist narrative, but grounded in historical fact.
• Wednesday (2022, TV): Gothic outsider girl vs. prep school conformity. Moderate progressive elements in institutional critique, balanced by genuine love of classic horror tropes.
• Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024): The subject of this review.

Burton is not a political filmmaker. He's a temperamental one. His films side with weirdness against normalcy. In the 1980s and 1990s, that was countercultural. In 2024, it's practically mainstream Hollywood orthodoxy, which is perhaps why Burton's recent work feels less distinctive than it once did.

Adult Viewer Insight

Michael Keaton is the reason to see this film, and he is a very good reason. At 73, he delivers Beetlejuice with the same unhinged energy he brought to the role at 37. The performance is not nostalgic. It's vital. Every scene he's in crackles with anarchic joy. Willem Dafoe matches him beat for beat as Wolf Jackson. Catherine O'Hara's Delia remains the franchise's great unsung comic creation: a woman so committed to her own pretentiousness that she becomes genuinely lovable.

The problem is everything around Beetlejuice. The Rory subplot is a waste of Justin Theroux's considerable talent. The Monica Bellucci villain barely speaks and exists primarily as a visual. The Astrid-Jeremy romance needed another draft. And the elimination of Charles Deetz, while understandable given Jeffrey Jones's real-world legal issues, leaves a father-shaped hole in the family dynamic that the film never fills with anything equally substantial.

Conservative viewers should calibrate expectations. This is a nostalgia sequel that delivers the nostalgia but wraps it in a 2024 family dynamic where the patriarch is dead, the men are villains or ghosts, and three generations of women figure things out on their own. That's not offensive. It's just noticeably, unmistakably current. If you can enjoy Beetlejuice's scenes (and you will, they're excellent) and tolerate the contemporary framing, the film is a fun ride. If the framing bothers you, you still have the 1988 original.