“I swear, life after death is so random”, complains Jenna Ortega’s frightened teenage character Astrid Deetz, in the midst of the action of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice – Beetlejuice. It is intended as a casual remark, one of those “Well, The happened!” / “Ooh, That is must hurt!” – statements aimed directly at the audience that are meant to be genuine jokes. Instead, it seems as if she is saying the quiet part out loud, thereby setting a tone for the entire film.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is basically a series of messy visual gags and half-hearted micro-character arcs all strung together haphazardly. It’s a showcase for Burton’s anarchic sense of humor and love of comic caricature, a sequel built on callbacks and echoes of the original 1988 film. It’s another checkmark on the seemingly endless list of 2020s franchise installments that serve as belated victory laps for past comic triumphs while diluting what was unique about those triumphs to begin with. But on its own, it’s not much of a movie. At best, it’s half a story — which is far more confusing than if it were pure, dizzying nonsense with no discernible story.

The plot feels like the screenwriters (Smallville And Wednesday Co-writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar were only on board for the first half of the project. At least the setup is full of specific character details: Beetlejuice Protagonist Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) has become a celebrated ghost hunter on TV and secret pill popper in her private life. She is traumatized by her experiences as a teenager with Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), the “bio-exorcist” (ghost? Or demon? This film says both) who terrorized Lydia’s family in the first film. She is estranged from her anxious teenage daughter Astrid, who thinks Lydia spends too much time with her TV audience.

The space between them leaves room for three predators with their own agendas: Lydia’s sleazy manager Rory (Justin Theroux); the local sad-boy Jeremy (Arthur Conti), whose doe-eyed Dostoyevsky fandom piques Astrid’s romantic interest; and, of course, Betelgeuse himself, who is still obsessed with marrying Lydia 30 years after they first met. All of these men want something from the women in this story, and all three disguise their ambition as romance. It would be a clever parallel if the whole structure didn’t fall apart as soon as it was set up.

Somewhere beneath all the nonsense that follows lies a vague hint of emotion, rooted in the idea that Astrid and Lydia desire each other’s love and attention but can’t find common ground, given Astrid’s skepticism of ghosts and Lydia’s determination to keep her daughter away from the world of the dead. The way both turn to other people and other pastimes to fill the gaps in their lives could be poignant if it wasn’t all so obviously a ploy to cram the film with even more buffoons – none of whom Burton and the writers really devote themselves to for more than one scene at a time.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a deeply overstuffed film, even if some of the traditional characters are awkwardly shunted offstage. Lydia’s mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) is still a central figure, but her husband Charles (Jeffrey Jones, whose career ended with a child porn scandal) conveniently dies in a comic accident depicted in stop motion to keep the actor off the screen. And the original ghosts Adam and Barbara (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, who perhaps knew better than to take Burton’s call for this film) “found a loophole,” evaded their assignment to haunt Lydia’s house for the next 125 years, and vanished from the story.

To fill their spots, the sequel trots out with a number of new faces, including Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson, a dead action movie actor who sees his new job as a cop in the afterlife as just another over-the-top performance, and Monica Bellucci as Delores, a patched-up ghost intent on devouring Betelgeuse’s soul. In terms of visual design, Monica is a straightforward and simple mix of Morticia Addams and Burton’s design for Sally in Nightmare Before Christmas – The Nightmare Before Christmas. As the main villain of the film, she is an absolute nothing – a few poses, a few visual effects, and no sense of threat whatsoever. She is just another cold body running around in a maze with no entrance or exit.

This is the real problem in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — Dolores, Rory, and Jeremy don’t get enough screen time or narrative space to become significant or memorable. No one does. The first half of the film blurs into a sea of ​​character trivia that doesn’t matter and never comes back. There’s no theme or thread to the minor details, like Astrid’s obsession with climate change and political activism, or Delia’s latest massive art project that uses her body as a canvas.

A hard-nosed film theorist might connect the ways the film’s three generations of women try to regain control of their lives in a chaotic world—Astrid by focusing on the environment, Lydia by commercializing and trivializing her unwelcome connection with the dead, Delia by making her control over her own body literal. But none of these plotlines are important to the story or, after the introduction, to the characters. The competing storylines crowd out and smooth over each other. They eventually evolve into a common device for setting up the cast for a rapid-fire tour of the afterlife, with everyone running around like they’re pulling off a Scooby-Doo door gag, only with more ill-conceived puns.

And then there is Keaton, who reprises the role of Betelgeuse as if he had never left it, dancing his way through a film in which there is no room for his outstanding performance. The first Beetlejuice draws much of its energy from the tonal conflict between Baldwin and Davis’s sweet, helpless, hopeless ghost characters, who feel like fish out of water, and Keaton’s cheerful but kid-friendly malice, with Ryder caught in the middle as Burton’s classic morbid goth eccentric. In the sequel, that conflict is no longer palpable: The entire world has taken on the riotous, macabre tone of Keaton’s character, and every actor in this story feels like a thinly masked version of the same person. None of it is sweet, except perhaps in the few bare moments when Astrid first meets Jeremy and wonders if she’s finally found someone who understands her, however vaguely and crudely drawn she is.

You really get the feeling that the writers left the building after shooting the first hour of the film, and that Burton has to fill the rest of the running time with “Hey, remember that from the first movie?” references. The stop-motion sandworms are back. The afterlife gags are back. The broad-shouldered corpse with a shrunken head is back, and now there are a lot more of them. Betelgeuse still pulls his exploding-face number seen from behind to scare people. A children’s choir sings Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat (Day-O)” in a set that doesn’t make the slightest sense except as a flashback. Once again, a big playback musical number is forced upon a group of unwilling participants. This is the laziest way to make a sequel: nostalgia with only minimal new touches, culminating in a climax that’s more or less the finale of the first film with a few old names hastily crossed out and a few new ones scribbled in.

At his best, Tim Burton was always excellent at finding a hint of genuine emotion behind his garish comedic nonsense: Edward Scissorhands’ yearning to fit in safely and securely with a family, Jack Skellington’s sheer joy at the new, exciting moments of Christmas, Ed Wood’s genuine love of cinema and his desire to create something beautiful and cherished. Burton’s characters used to stand out both for their unpredictable, gleefully cruel idiosyncrasies and for the way they conveyed the relatable feeling of wanting to be accepted without necessarily having to conform. But there is no sign of sincerity anywhere in Beetlejuice Beetlejuiceand no hint of understandable feelings. The entire film is an echo chamber full of incidents. As Astrid notes, it is so random.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is now in theaters.