Director Tim Burton has set himself a high bar in making a sequel to his beloved black comedy BEETLEJUICE. It was a film that blended live action and animation - a heartbreakingly wholesome couple and a ghoulishly dysfunctional family - macabre jokes about suicide and an iconic possession sequence set to Harry Belafonte. How do you top the inventiveness, the zaniness and the hilarity of Michael Keaton's titular performance? How do you make us love characters in the way that we loved Lydia Deetz and wanted to protect her just as the Maitlands did?
Sadly, except for a couple of flashes of brilliance, the sequel fails to live up to the original. We waste a good half hour simply catching up with characters and it must be 45 minutes before The Juice Is Loose. Over thirty years have passed. Lydia (Winona Ryder) is now a schlocky TV presenter with an oleaginous TV producer love interest (Justin Theroux). Her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) is now fantastically successful as an artist, but in mourning for her beloved Charles. Delia and Lydia have made a kind of peace since the original film, but Lydia now has problems with her own teenage daughter (Jenna Ortega). The family gathers at the original house for Charles' funeral. Shenanigans ensue.
What's to love? Michael Keaton, underused, but fantastic. Monica Belucci and Danny DeVito criminally underused. Catherine O'Hara's occasional killer line, especially playing off Justin Theroux. A fantastic flashback played as a foreign-language black-and-white melodrama. A brilliantly funny use of Richard Marx' Right Here Waiting. But too much of it was plodding through character catch-ups. Not enough of it was funny. Are we really surprised by the silly sandworms as deus ex machina? No. There are no stakes. There are no feelings. What's it for?
BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Venice and is on global release today.
No comments:
Post a Comment