Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

 A sequel that's been stuck in development hell for thirty-six years, from a director who hasn't made anything good in the last two decades and a half.

 There's nothing left of the original scripts for the sequel commissioned as soon as the first movie was deemed a success - the one that came closest to being made would have sent the Deetz family and Beetlejuice over to Hawaii. Instead, we get one written by geek goofball Seth Grahame-Smith, and heavily rewritten by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough. The final screenplay is... well, it's fucking dire, story-wise; A shambling, muddled mess of trite plot points, dropped threads and unnecessary characters.

 But. And this is a big but, I cannot lie: none of that matters, because it's funny.

 Lydia Deetz (Wynona Ryder) has grown into a bit of a mess, a minor celebrity cashing in on her minor medium powers to host a chintzy paranormal show on TV. She's fallen under the spell of Rory (Justin Theroux), a sleazy TV producer who's always looking for an angle, and has an estranged daughter - Astrid (Jenna Ortega) who detests both of them.

 The plot (we need to call it something) kicks in when Lydia's mom (Catherine O'Hara) informs everyone that the patriarch of the family has passed away (in a hilarious claymation plane crash/shark attack). So the whole family converges on the old family house, where that old wascally demon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) awaits, chased by a ghost of his own - an old soul-sucking flame played by Monica Bellucci who, for all she gets to do, ends up being more of a live-action visual reference to Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas than anything else.

 It's a very busy plot which... seems to hold most of its threads in contempt, judging by the way it resolves them in the laziest manner possible. I wish I could say that's because it's just there as a joke-delivering mechanism (AKA the ZAZ defence), but it often slows down and tries to deliver more conventional narrative goods as well; Try being the operative word here. There's a whole thing with Lydia's old husband (Santiago Cabrera), for one, and Astrid falling for a local boy (Arthur Conti). Both elements are extremely clichéd and resolved in deeply unsatisfying ways.
 In any case - even if it was all about the jokes, that's still no excuse; there's been plenty of comedies goofier than this that have managed to deliver a satisfying story. Hell, this film is a direct sequel to one of them.

 So that's the bad. Luckily, aside from that, everyone - from director Tim Burton down to the actors, the set designers, and the people behind the wonderfully tactile special effects - is, well, completely there. Everyone just seems to be having a huge amount of fun, and it's infectious as hell.

 All the actors are great and obviously having a blast. Ryder is likeable as ever, O'Hara is hilarious, and new additions Ortega and Conti do wonders with fairly shitty characters and cookie-cutter puppy love subplot.  And Keaton... well, he's a fucking national treasure, so it's no surprise how good he is.
 New characters like Father Damien* (Burn Gorman, hilarious) and especially Willem Dafoe's action-star-turned-ghost-detective probably shouldn't have as much screen time - and they wouldn't, if the movie was better written... but Dafoe in particular is having such a great time (and his character is so funny) that I can all but see Tim Burton telling his crew "eh, screw it, leave everything in." I'm glad they did.

 The special effects favour practical over digital and are full of charm. A lot of it doesn't make sense - why does Beetlejuice preside a room-full of office drones with shrunken heads? Well, it's a callback, sure, but more importantly: they look hilarious. The underworld still has more than a hint of the surreal, and things are kept playfully gory, with comedy blood squirts deployed strategically throughout the movie. Danny Elfman returns to score; The soundtrack didn't bowl me over, but it sure is Beetlejuicy. The needle drops fare a little better - Sigur Ross for some vintage indie cred, and a gloriously campy pop standard that everyone is forced to lip sync to at the end. Turns out old Beets has just as terrible a taste in music as you'd expect.
 Don't expect much in the way of new cool concepts - the movie's biggest metaphysical expansion, The Soul Train, is a ridiculously obvious joke, but goofy enough to cause an amiable groan. The film is more about small, bite-sized gags and ideas.

 It is so good to have Burton back, fully engaged. This is probably closer to Mars Attacks than anything else in his filmography - the 'fuck it let's just have fun' vibe is strong in this one. And that is beyond fine.

*: I chose to believe he's a descendant of In a Valley of Violence's priest, which enhanced his (already very funny) character for me by several magnitudes.