Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.What does Tim Burton want to bring back from the dead? A cruel observer might say: his own career as a big-league filmmaker. The jibe needs nuance. Decades have gone by since the golden age of Edward Scissorhands and Mars Attacks!, but Burton has always at least stayed steadily employed. Still. Interest in the brand of pop-Gothic that made his name has not been what it was for years — until now, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. A belated sequel to the giddy morbid comedy of 1988, the movie is Burton squared and in toto, a zany assembly of spooks, ghouls and freakish tomfoolery. Consider it a seance, headlined by original cast members Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton.For Keaton at least, the 36 years between films barely registers, mostly due to his pasty-faced get-up as obnoxious demon Betelgeuse, marooned in the afterlife. He and everyone else is still quickly reminded of passing time. If blame needs to be found for the new movie, look first to Wednesday, the hit modern riff on The Addams Family that Burton launched on Netflix in 2022. In the smallest surprise in cinema history, the deadpan young star of that show, Jenna Ortega, now takes a role as the brooding daughter of Ryder’s Lydia Deetz: once a misfit teen goth herself, lately an unhappy TV ghost hunter.Wednesday will have got Burton his budget. The problem is what to do with it. The film is a frantic spaghetti of decentred subplots seemingly aimed at every member of a large focus group. In Burton’s heyday, the madcap pace was a blast. Now the execution is at once chaotic and eager to please, the movie spinning you in place until you get dizzy while demanding to know if you’re having fun yet. Ryder and Ortega are given a maudlin mother-daughter storyline; reprising her art-world maven from the first film, Catherine O’Hara twiddles her thumbs; Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe manage not to visibly check their watches in Halloweeny cameos. Now and then, Keaton himself turns up, barely connected to the rest of the movie. (It is seldom a good sign when a film has to pause 40 minutes in to explain who the title character is.) These are clearly tricky times for backers Warner Bros under pugnacious CEO David Zaslav, but can the studio really no longer afford script editors?Frustratingly, between long, less-than-funny stretches there are moments when things click: sparkly little flashes of macabre slapstick, Justin Theroux with a nightmare ponytail as a TV producer heel. And there is still a lot of comic juice in the central conceit Burton came up with back when Ronald Reagan was president: death as an antic bureaucratic waiting room. Yet for all the commercial importance of the Wednesday fans, much of the movie feels stuck in that same eternal 1980s: a film about TV rather than podcasts, with cobwebby gags about graffiti artists, and a dig at social media that the influencers around me at the screening laughed at uncertainly. Take it as a warning, kids. Before the afterlife, you first get old.★★☆☆☆ In UK and US cinemas from September 6
