Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review – Tim Burton has fun with pleasingly idiosyncratic sequel
The director’s long-imagined follow-up to his 1988 cult movie Beetlejuice revels in some gleefully silly moments while narrowly avoiding that dated feeling
Sun 8 Sep 2024 08.00 BST
Hollywood has a history of reanimating the decaying corpses of long-dead movies with belated sequels, so perhaps it was just a matter of time before somebody delved into the grave marked Beetlejuice. That someone was only ever going to be Tim Burton, director of the original 1988 film, and although discussions about a Beetlejuicesequel were reportedly under way for decades, Burton maintained that he would only consider it if Michael Keaton reprised the title role and any sequel remained faithful to the spirit of the morbidly eccentric original film. On both these counts, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice succeeds. As the prankster demon “bio-exorcist”, a suitably manic Keaton scuttles through the film like a giant cockroach in a striped suit, while the decaying DNA of the original picture is evident in every hyperstylised frame of the sequel.
