In March of 1988, a horror film by the name of Beetlejuice was released. In September of 2024, the sequel to that film was finally released. With a 7/10 on IMDb and an 80% percent Rotten Tomato audience score, the film has been generally well received by the public. The general plot of the film has three generations of the Deetz family return to their old home. Lydia, still haunted by Beetlejuice, has to save her daughter and opens a portal to the Afterlife.
Within the positives of the film, it has managed to capture the old style of some of the stop motion by bringing it back instead of attempting to recreate it with computer generated images. This has led to the film being able to gain the same old style that the original film had. All of the scenes within the Afterlife are able to mix stop motion and CGI to create an immersive world where everything seems chaotic but also still seamlessly flows together. While not having the same quality of storytelling as the original, the movie manages to tell a myriad of stories within the confines of its 104-minute runtime.
However, the many storylines also act as a detriment to the movie. Some scenes feel rushed and underproduced and the overall quality of each substory suffers as the runtime is split between them. The storyline, which feels as though it will be the main story at the beginning of the film, ends up finishing in a fairly anticlimactic and rushed way a little after the halfway mark.
Michael Keaton was brought back to reprise his role as Beetlejuice for the film and, as always, he was amazing. However, there seems to be a glaring lack of Beetlejuice screen time throughout the movie. All of the scenes with him are funny and very well acted, but near the beginning of the movie there is very little of him to be seen. The producers attempt to build the characters to give a bigger emotional depth to the rest of the film. For example, they try to build the relationship between Lydia and her daughter so that when the daughter is finally in need of help, you understand Lydia’s desperation to help her daughter. However, this doesn’t work because even though we see how Lydia loves her daughter very much, there is no sense of reciprocation from her, so the eventual ending to that emotional plotline feels undeserved. Despite spending that much time on building the characters, they wind up with a clear lack of depth and are very shallow personality-wise.
Overall, the film was fairly mediocre and only deserves one thumbs up. Despite not being a masterpiece of storytelling, it was still very fun and entertaining. If you’ve never seen the first film and you go into this movie with no expectations, you will have a great time, and even if you’ve seen the first movie, you will probably be able to enjoy this one. However, if you have seen the first movie this one will be anticlimactic and a fairly big let down.
