Tim Burton is washed up. Sorry, it’s nothing personal. But seriously, look back through Burton’s recent filmography and tell me the last time he made a film with any kind of staying power worthy of his reputation.

There’s an argument to be made that Burton reached his expiration date in 2010 with Alice in Underland. Some might go back a bit further and argue that he crested with Sweeney Todd in 2007. Or maybe the 2005 adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sent up the first red flags.

Personally, I would argue that when his signature quirky style got commercialized and oversaturated in the media zeitgeist, Burton lost the subversive flair that was his whole raison d’etre. Edward Scissorhands or Lydia Deetz don’t work so well as parodies of anodyne suburban Americana, now that there are whole industries for kids who want to look like a Tim Burton drawing. I might add that Batman (1989) is demonstrably not the greatest or most influential superhero film anymore, not after a solid decade of the goddamn Infinity Saga. And it’s not like Burton has done much to stay relevant or change his style with the times.

So here we are with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, in which Burton tries taking us all back to when he was young and hip and transgressive and everyone liked him. It’s a depressingly common tactic in cinema nowadays. Hell, the very concept of rehashed nostalgia is practically Disney’s whole business model. Warner Bros. damn near sank their whole studio with the double-whammy of Space Jam: A New Legacy and The Flash. Even now, we’ve got The Crow (2024) and Alien: Romulus in theaters.

Anyway, we’ve got Tim Burton close to rock-bottom, a Hollywood industry desperately clinging to nostalgia (in the interest of easy money, leveraging brand recognition into fan goodwill, and keeping the audience in an impressionable childlike state of mind), and the shockingly successful “Wednesday” series on Netflix offering Burton some new connections. Thus we have the ideal confluence of circumstances to finally get the Beetlejuice sequel across the finish line after 35 years in development hell.

So where are the Maitlands all these years later? Never explained! The best we get is some throwaway line to say the Maitlands found some kind of loophole to get out of their house and on to the afterlife, but the details are resolutely unclear.

At least it’s more than we ever got to explain why the Maitlands weren’t in the animated series. I digress.

Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder once again) got married and divorced in the intervening decades, before her ex-husband died under mysterious circumstances. She’s now the host of a supernatural talk show, working as a spiritual medium to consult on hauntings and televise her findings. Her current boyfriend/manager is played by Justin Theroux, so you know Rory is a sleazy narcissistic hate sink.

Then we’ve got Lydia’s daughter, an antisocial teenager supercharged with disaffected millennial rage. Astrid (Jenna Ortega) has been on strained terms with her mom ever since her father passed. Basically put, Astrid figures that Lydia is a fraud because Lydia can apparently call upon every ghost out there except her dead ex-husband. It certainly doesn’t help that Lydia is socially incompetent, incapable of connecting with her daughter or much of anyone else unless her douchebag boyfriend Rory is there to do the fast-talking.

In summary, Astrid is terrible at dealing with death and Lydia is terrible at dealing with life. It’s a neat contrast, and a rather solid setup for a mother-daughter development arc within the premise of the franchise.

Then there’s Delia Deetz, once again played by Catherine O’Hara. This character has always been insanely pretentious, but she’s completely lost herself up her own ass by this point. And she turns into a full-tilt lunatic with the passing of her husband, the catalyst that brings everyone back to the old Maitland house and gets the plot running.

I hasten to add that Charles Deetz was killed off in such a way that the character could come back without Jeffrey Jones reprising the role. Presumably because having him in the cast along with so many teenage actors and extras would’ve posed a legal and logistical nightmare.

(Side note: I’d be remiss not to mention that Danny Elfman returned to score the film even with his own list of dreadful accusations. Then again, it makes quite a difference that Elfman’s supposed transgressions were only ever allegations, while Jones’ misdeeds were tried and proven in a court of law.)

Speaking of dead people, what’s been happening in the afterlife? Well, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) has apparently expanded his operation, with a platoon of shrunken-headed minions to handle calls and hauntings all over the world. More importantly, there’s the second big plot catalyst: The return of BJ’s ex-wife (Delores, played by Monica Bellucci), a witch who can drain souls. She goes on a rampage and perma-deads a bunch of ghouls all through the underworld, prompting intervention from the late detective Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe). Except Wolf isn’t really a detective, he’s just an actor who played a hard-boiled cop in a few too many shlocky movies and he’s lost himself in his delusions.

Let’s see, what am I forgetting? Oh yeah, there’s Jeremy Frazier (Arthur Conti), a young local boy who presents himself as a potential love interest for Astrid. No way that could possibly result in another extended storyline that makes this whole plot even more convoluted.

It’s easy to say that the movie has too much going on, but it’s a little more nuanced than that. Every storyline has its justifiable purpose and I get why they were all included. It’s really more an issue of pacing. If this movie had been 120+ minutes long, the filmmakers likely would’ve had the necessary space to give each storyline its due. But at only 100 minutes, the film can only spin its wheels setting everything up for the first hour. All the major plot developments are crammed into the last thirty minutes, which inevitably results in so many storylines given short shrift in the mad dash to get everything resolved tightly and quickly.

Sadly, this does extend to a good many characters, many of whom are only saved by pitch-perfect casting. Willem Dafoe is a laugh riot as the wannabe detective. The demonically beautiful witch only works at all because it’s Monica Bellucci playing her. Justin Theroux is playing well within his wheelhouse as the comedic heel. All the original actors came to play like they haven’t lost a step, and Jenna Ortega fits in like she was always there to begin with.

Everything good about this movie comes down to one simple word: Fun. It’s irreverent and subversive in all the ways that made the original movie fun, but updated for where the bar has moved over the past few decades. There are cameos and callbacks, but they all feel earned and they add to the sense of expanding on the world-building of the previous film. Of course, it certainly helps that we’ve got a character like Beetlejuice on hand, who can freely defy and break and rewrite all the rules to suit his own wants and needs. And even then, the filmmakers are smart enough to keep BJ’s screentime limited (though not quite as limited as the first time) to keep his comedy fresh and the internal logic reasonably intact.

It says so much about this movie that the filmmakers repeatedly touch so many third rails and come away unscathed. There’s a tease for a potential third movie, but it plays as one final scare instead of desperate sequel-baiting. Beetlejuice gets an origin story — something nobody wanted or needed — but it’s one of the funniest sequences in the movie and it provides some vital exposition about another character. Time after time, the filmmakers know just how hard to press and for precisely how long to keep getting away with shit that would leave any other filmmaker floundering.

Most importantly, the filmmakers nail the balance between horror and comedy. It’s transgressive and subversive and disgusting in ways that shock and amuse in equal measure without compromising the themes about life and death and moving on. Considering the director’s aforementioned cold streak, and given all the recent films that failed miserably at striking this same horror/comedy balance (The most recent Haunted Mansion adaptation and all the Ghostbusters films of the past ten years come to mind.), this is genuinely impressive.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is messy in all the best and worst ways. The gross-out horror, the production design, the mix of practical and digital effects, the chaotic nature of the setting and the characters and Beetlejuice himself… it’s all great fun to watch. Such a damn shame that the movie stumbles in its desperation to juggle so many disparate storylines and wrap them all up as quickly as possible. The end result is a first hour that moves way too slowly, followed by forty minutes that go by too quickly to notice the plot contrivances and dead-ends.

On the whole, I can give it a recommendation. It’s not good enough to justify the extended wait, but it’s a story that could only have been told after so many years of intervening history. Most of all, the film is simply too damn fun and too gleefully creative to be ignored. All we wanted a film that paid respect to what came before while expanding the world-building into new territory, and that’s pretty much exactly what we got.

That said, Burton is hardly out of the woods just yet. He cranked out a solid movie by revisiting a film and a style from back in his prime, and that trick will only work once. He’s got to update his style and sensibility into something that will register with a modern audience, or he’s toast.