In the wake of her father's sudden (apparently gruesome) death, Lydia (Winona Ryder) tries to deal with that, her sarcastic daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), her mother's (Catherine O'Hara) bizarre performance of grief, and the useless, irritating dipshit (Justin Theroux) that wants to marry her. Oh, and she keeps seeing brief glimpses of Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), who is himself fleeing an old flame that wants to devour his soul (Monica Bellucci) and ducking a deceased actor (Willem Dafoe) now in charge of the Ghost Police, or whatever they were called.
When the movie focuses on Ryder, Ortega, and O'Hara, their respective relationships and ways of coping with the loss of a loved one, it's not bad. O'Hara consoling Lydia about the poor relationship with Astrid by comparing it to (a rose-colored view of) their mother-daughter relationship, or alternately, taking glee in the headaches Astrid gives Lydia as a form of karmic payback, is funny. The two revert to this faked optimism and exasperated eye rolls as a familiar coping mechanism. The way Lydia shifts between trying to connect with Astrid, trying not to hold too tightly, or trying to protect her. How she seems to just accept Astrid's resentment for her father's death, or how Astrid keeps defaulting to dismissing her mother as a 'fraud' whenever anyone compliments her.
(I half-expected the whole thing about Astrid's dad dying in the Amazon to be a lie she told to protect herself. She refers to her dad as loving to travel and being a free spirit. I wondered if he didn't just up and leave one day, and rather than sully her memories, sanctified him and threw all the blame on the parent who was still around to lash out at.)
Most of the rest felt tacked on. Bellucci is pursuing Beetlejuice (his retelling of how they met and fell out, shot like either The Seventh Seal or some early German Expressionist horror film, was kind of clever), but she's so far behind he never feels in any danger. No narrow escapes, because he's always off enacting his plan to tie Lydia to him forever. Maybe that's because Burton knows we wouldn't necessarily want Beetlejuice to escape. Not because Bellucci's character is some innocent victim, but because Beetlejuice is a morally questionable sleaze, at best. Having his body reduced to a used Capri Sun package once Bellucci drained his soul might not be the worst thing. When she finally catches up, she's dispatched within about 2 minutes.
Dafoe's character is, well, I can see how he's supposed to be funny, but it doesn't work for me. The movie does this entire wedding song bit with "MacArthur Park" - which feels like it goes on for 5 minutes and had me questioning my life choices - repeatedly showing us Dafoe and his squad closing in, only to instantly render them irrelevant when they make their move.
Theroux's character is as irritating as I imagine he's meant to be, but that meant every time he started talking I changed the channel. Either he was so obliviously earnest that I'd feel embarrassed, or he was a disingenuous twerp spouting crap, in which case I didn't want to hear it. I was changing the channel to Bad Boys, which ought to tell you how desperate I was to escape.
It's 105 minutes long, so it's not an especially bloated movie, but it certainly feels like it at times. Probably could have been as good or better at 90 minutes.
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