Overzealous ghost cop didn’t come across as an antagonist. He felt more like a character that was trying to do good but just didn’t have the full picture of what was actually going on. He was sort of filling the role that Juno had in the original.
On a positive note, and not mentioned yet, I enjoyed Danny Devito’s cameo as a careless ghost janitor. I think they were hinting at him possibly being the ghost of his version of The Penguin.
Thinking about it, I think I would have liked the movie more if it was trimmed down to one new antagonist: the ghost kid. Lydia would have to make a deal with the devil (um, a deal with the Juice) to save her. There wouldn’t even be a need to show ghosts of the two dads–having them tied to the location of their deaths for a number of years was an already established bit of world-building from the original movie and plenty of explaination for their ghosts not showing up.
I agree that the Dolores subplot was kinda pointless and unnecessary, but Rory is basically a living parallel to Betelguese. They both want to trick Lydia into marriage, but Rory was just doing a better job since he was still alive.
The first 40% was yawn. The last 60% pure classic Beetlejuice.
I don’t get the whole Delores thing. They should have left it out and developed it for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Interesting way they worked in Jeffery Jones being cancelled by Hollywood.
Saw it this weekend after watching the original the night before.
I agree that there were just too many moving parts. I wasn’t a fan of the ghost kid as he reminded me too much of that doofus kid in Wednesday, who of course had the same chemistry with Jenna Ortega as the ghost kid had… with Jenna Ortega. Willem Dafoe’s character was just superfluous, as was Beetlejuice’s ex. If they just stuck to the Lydia/Rory story and expanded that a bit then I think it would’ve had much of the magic of the original.
Adding Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis would have made the movie an absolute treasure, no matter how bad the rest of it was (of course, I kind of have a schoolboy crush on Geena Davis so I’m biased there…). I wonder if Burton et. al. tried to get them to come back?
I had high hopes and while I wasn’t exactly disappointed I think I would’ve rather seen Speak No Evil and waited for BB to come out on PPV and just watched it at home.
Question – Did anyone get a look at the item that Jeremy used to kill his father? A friend and I saw it and thought it might be a circular saw but it was so fast that we couldn’t really see it.
I have no idea. It is something thin and possibly has a power cord dangling from it, but it doesn’t look like anything I recognize.
Pitch meeting. Touches on the aforementioned over-abundance of story threads.
