Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review: The vibes are right, but something feels wrong

It's showtime for Tim Burton's legacy sequel, which is fun and inventive on its surface but lacks the emotional honesty of the 1989 original

From left, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice stars Catherine O'Hara, Jenna Ortega, Winona Ryder and Justin Theroux. PA

We’re able to forgive a lot if the vibes are right. That’s the operative word for millennials and Gen Z alike – vibes.

For the current crop of young cinephiles, many films that were discarded by generations past have now been reclaimed because, even with a half-baked script, they carry the right energy and are now deemed misunderstood classics.

The "vibes" crowd seems to be exactly the correct audience for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Those are the moviegoers who won’t care that the script is shabby and uninspired. Instead, they’ll notice how much fun these actors are having being together again – they’ll revel in the practical effects and inventive gags hiding around every misshapen door or shrunken head.

There’s a good time to be had here if you aren’t asking too much from it. If you require a bit of emotional investment, though, you may start fidgeting in your seat pretty quickly. This is a legacy sequel to the 1989 VHS classic, a film which followed a trickster demon from the underworld who terrorised the eccentric Deetz family. It was an effective gross-out slapstick comedy wrapped in aesthetics inspired by German expressionist cinema, and it all hung together spectacularly well.

It felt singular and almost singlehandedly established director Tim Burton’s reputation, which he continued to build with an excellent crop of '90s films but has been coasting off it the past two decades with a steady output of subpar material. But for the first time in a long time, Burton feels like he’s having fun again – opening his old toy box and remembering how much he enjoyed prosthetics and practical set design before he lost himself in the computer-generated era.

It’s also clear how much he enjoys working with this group of actors, including the returning Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, who are all in fine form. He’s also brought some of his more recent muses along for the ride, headlined by Wednesday star Jenna Ortega, who plays Ryder’s daughter, and his real-life partner Monica Bellucci, who plays a demonic femme fatale.

The script is credited to the creators of Netflix’s Wednesday, which Burton directed, but it might as well have been written by ChatGPT, full of heartless echoes of stories better executed elsewhere. Here, Lydia Deetz (Ryder) has grown from a macabre-obsessed teenager into the host of a ghost-hunting television show, a fame that irks her daughter, who is so resentful of her mother that she has decided that ghosts aren’t real.

After the death of their patriarch, the family all return to the home where the first film is set, which sets into motion a series of events that pulls them all into the world of the dead and reunites them with their former adversary Beetlejuice (Keaton).

The humour works because it’s left in the hands of very funny people. O’Hara, perhaps the funniest actress working today, is the main reason I wouldn’t recommend watching the whole thing on mute, elevating flat writing into laugh-out-loud moments through impeccable timing and delivery.

While the film packs itself with enough gags to sustain it until the end, it’s clear how little of this sticks, and how little we actually care about these characters, when the film reaches for an emotional moment – which each fail to land one after the next.

Not all that failure is down to the writing. Ryder was eminently believable as a teenage goth and remains so as a macabre adult. Ortega, on the other hand, feels weirdly miscast, like she’s doing a whiny depressed teen impression rather than embodying one – eminently ironic after the success of Wednesday.

Maybe it’s not her fault. Perhaps this sort of disaffected teenage goth character only suited Gen X, an era in which the privilege, conformity and consumerist excess of the '80s felt like a burden and inspired rebellion and nihilism. With Gen Z, who operate under a very different set of rules, the vibes don’t feel quite right.

But you’ll only hit the emptiness at the centre if you keep digging. Don’t bother – just go along for another theme park ride. It’s one of the better of its ilk, though that’s a low bar to clear.