‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ review: Michael Keaton turns back time in pointless sequel

movie review

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Running time: 104 minutes. Rated PG-13 (violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use). In theaters Sept. 6.

By the end of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” I was fully convinced that Michael Keaton really is a ghost.

Thirty-six years have passed since Tim Burton’s original horror-comedy hit theaters, but you’d never know the “Birdman” actor has aged a minute, let alone more than three decades. It’s spooky.

The nuclear sludge wig and drunken clown makeup help, of course, however Keaton’s sonic boom of energy as the filthy bio-exorcist goes far beyond what most 72-year-old men can muster. His Beetlejuice remains a trailer-trash triumph.

The same, I’m afraid, cannot be said of the mostly pointless sequel he’s a part of.

This belabored movie, which is much more serious than its predecessor and takes nearly an hour to take off, feels like it lasts a Day-O.

During the creaky first half, Burton and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar cake on exposition to justify their film’s existence.

A lot of folks, we learn, are dead.

Lydia Deetz’s (Winona Ryder) dad and Delia Deetz’s (Catherine O’Hara) husband from the first flick has just been chewed up by a shark. Lydia’s spouse Richard, with whom she has a daughter named Astrid (Jenna Ortega), was killed on an Amazon trek. And Lydia’s new boyfriend Rory’s (Justin Theroux) wife is six feet under, too.

There’s a lot of “trauma” talk. It’s overkill, so to speak.

And those who aren’t in the grave yet are hammy cartoons.

Lydia, who was the only living person in the first film who could see the recently deceased Maitlands (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, who aren’t in this one), is now the host of a paranormal TV show called “Ghost House” — a lazy and dated idea. Tortured by ghouls, she pops anxiety pills and dates her pretentious, hippie-dippie manager Rory.

Ryder’s eyebrow acting falls somewhere between her paranoid “Stranger Things” mom and the kooky behavior she exhibited onstage at the 2017 Screen Actors Guild Awards. As her boring beau, Theroux tries too hard to match the big personalities around him.

One is O’Hara, whose Delia is still a cliche of an artist in NYC. These days, she is experimenting with video in a downtown exhibition called “The Human Canvas.” O’Hara is at her funniest when she is totally earnest, so a script as arch and self-aware as “BB” puts the actress up “Schitt’s Creek.”

The Deetz patriarch’s untimely death brings the dysfunctional family back to their angular upstate abode for the funeral. Spoiler alert: Beetlejuice’s name gets said three times.

If Part 1 is about loss, Part 2 is about love.

In town, skeptical Astrid (“I believe in things I can see — science, facts”) flirts with a nice, Dostoyevsky-obsessed loner named Jeremy (“I don’t trust what I can’t touch”) played by Arthur Conti.

Bachelor Beetlejuice is pursued by his vindictive ex Delores (Monica Bellucci), the Elvira-esque “leader of a soul-sucking death cult.” Her primary purpose, so far as I can tell, is to transition scenes and allow for a forced appearance by Willem Dafoe as a movie star turned noir detective.

Once all the pawns are in place, the movie finally lets its haunted hair down. Burton is almost his old self when he’s deep in the Netherworld conjuring up gnarly antics for Beetlejuice (there’s a wild bit involving a baby), inventing wildly creative ways to die and DJing an eclectic playlist.

Besides Danny Elfman’s mischievous original score, memorable sequences are told with Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting,” the Bee Gees’ “Tragedy” and even a loving nod to Brian De Palma. Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park” gets the “Day-O” treatment.

Burton’s imagination is on full blast for the first time in years. What’s still missing is his once formidable skill as a storyteller.

“Beetlejuice” worked in 1988 because of the relatability of Baldwin and Davis. The pair played the vital roles of two normal, rural people surrounded by absurdity: the afterlife and self-absorbed Manhattanites. They were our way into Burton’s weird world.

The sequel, by contrast, is so constantly insane that we become quickly desensitized to the mania and indifferent to the plot.

When your most grounded character is Beetlejuice, it’s time to consult the handbook.