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What does Tim Burton want to bring back from the dead? A cruel observer would say: his own career as a top-class filmmaker. This dig needs to be differentiated. Decades have passed since the golden age of Edward Scissorhands And Mars attacks!but Burton was always at least permanently employed. Nevertheless. Interest in the kind of pop-goth that made him famous has not been as great for years as it once was – until now, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

As a belated sequel to the dizzying, morbid comedy of 1988, the film is Burton squared and in totala wacky collection of ghosts, ghouls and bizarre nonsense. Think of it as a seance, with original cast members Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton headlining.

For Keaton at least, the 36 years between the films are barely noticeable, mainly due to his pasty costume as the disgusting demon Betelgeuse, stranded in the afterlife. He and everyone else are still quickly reminded of the passing of time. If one has to blame the new film, then first of all Wednesdaythe successful modern reef on The Addams Family which Burton released on Netflix in 2022. In the smallest surprise in cinema history, the series’ young star, dry-faced Jenna Ortega, now takes on the role of the brooding daughter of Ryder’s Lydia Deetz: once a gothic outsider herself, more recently a hapless ghost hunter on television.

Wednesday will have given Burton his budget. The problem is what you do with it. The film is a wild spaghetti tangle of off-center subplots that seem to be aimed at every member of a large focus group. In Burton’s heyday, the crazy pacing was a blast. Now the execution is simultaneously chaotic and pleasing, the film spinning you on the spot until you’re dizzy, demanding to know if you’re having fun yet.

Ryder and Ortega are given a maudlin mother-daughter story; Catherine O’Hara, reprising her art-world expert role from the first film, twiddles her thumbs; Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe manage to avoid visibly checking their watches in Halloween cameos. Keaton himself pops up now and then, barely connected to the rest of the film. (It’s rarely a good sign when a film has to be stopped after 40 minutes to explain who the title character is.) These are obviously difficult times for financiers Warner Bros under cantankerous CEO David Zaslav, but can the studio really no longer afford script editors?

Frustratingly, between the long, not-so-funny stretches, there are moments when things click: glittery little flashes of macabre slapstick, Justin Theroux with a nightmarish ponytail as a TV producer heel. And there’s still plenty of comedic juice in the central idea that Burton invented back when Ronald Reagan was president: death as a silly bureaucratic waiting room.

But despite the commercial importance of the Wednesday Fans, much of the film feels like it’s stuck in the eternal 1980s: a film about television instead of podcasts, with quirky gags about graffiti artists and a jab at social media that made the influencers around me at the screening laugh uncertainly. Take this as a warning, kids. You’re going to grow old before the afterlife.

★★☆☆☆

In cinemas in the UK and the USA from 6 September