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What is Fear’s verdict on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice?
Fear treats the film as a mixed, watchable return—not a disaster, but not the triumphant restoration of the original’s impact either. His review weighs the sequel’s comic and visual familiarity against a crowded plot that, in his view, gives too many threads too little room.
That distinction matters: “fine fine” is not an unqualified endorsement. Fear finds enough enjoyable performances and set pieces to make the sequel work in stretches, but sees its accumulation of callbacks and subplots as a limit on how much it can surprise or cohere.
How does the sequel bring the Deetz family back?
The story returns to Winter River after Charles Deetz dies in a South Pacific plane accident involving a shark attack. Lydia, Delia, and Lydia’s partner Rory come back to the family’s country home, while Lydia’s daughter Astrid is brought from boarding school.
#1 Best Overall
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Lydia now hosts the reality program Ghost House, using her ability to communicate with the dead as a public persona. Astrid resents that work and longs to reach her deceased father. Her connection with local boy Jeremy draws her into the supernatural events that bring the film’s strands together.
Meanwhile, the afterlife plot follows Delores, reassembled and pursuing souls, and Wolf Jackson, a former actor turned investigator. Fear’s central concern is not that these ideas lack potential, but that the added material competes with the family story rather than consistently strengthening it.
Rank #2
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Do Ryder and Ortega make the family story work?
For Fear, the strongest new center is the relationship between Lydia and Astrid. He regards Ortega as an especially effective choice and says she and Ryder make a believable mother-daughter pair. Their friction gives the sequel an emotional line amid its supernatural complications: Astrid’s skepticism and resentment meet Lydia’s familiar connection to the afterlife, now complicated by her television career.
The returning cast also helps preserve continuity with the original. Fear’s praise is directed at the ensemble and the family dynamic, not at a claim that the sequel recreates the first film’s novelty.
Rank #3
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Why does Beetlejuice feel less central?
Keaton is game and entertaining when he appears, according to Fear, but Beetlejuice is present for only about a third of the film. That limited screen time makes the title character feel peripheral to a story busy with the Deetzes, Delores, Wolf Jackson, and Astrid’s predicament.
For viewers expecting the sequel to revolve around Beetlejuice himself, this is one of Fear’s clearest reservations. The character remains a source of comic energy, but the film’s attention is spread across a larger set of plot machinery.
Rank #4
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Do the callbacks and Burton imagery pay off?
Fear enjoys the sequel’s recognizable visual and comic language, including stop-motion sandworms, gags in the afterlife waiting room, and skewed checkerboard corridors. Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park” also anchors a callback set piece. These touches deliver the familiar Burton textures the film is returning to, and Fear finds real pleasures in them.
His qualification is that recognition is not the same as rediscovery. The callbacks can entertain, but they do not fully restore the surprise of the 1988 original. The sequel’s balance tilts toward revisiting familiar imagery rather than finding a consistently fresh use for it.
Best Value
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Where do the extra plots help—or get in the way?
The expanded afterlife material gives the film more characters and comic possibilities, but Fear finds some of those threads underserved or distracting. Delores and Wolf Jackson add activity, yet their stories do not always deepen the Deetz family conflict. In his reading, the result is a sequel with plenty happening and less focus than its best family scenes need.
That is the review’s main comparison with the first film: not simply whether the sequel repeats recognizable elements, but whether those elements and new plots build toward a stronger whole. Fear’s answer is mixed. The Ryder-Ortega relationship offers a useful anchor; the accumulation of side stories often pulls attention away from it.
What does “36 years later” mean for the comparison?
Fear frames the sequel as arriving 36 years after the 1988 original. That long gap heightens the expectation of a return, but his review does not treat elapsed time as proof that the new film should—or does—match its predecessor. Instead, he judges the sequel on its own mixture of performances, visual callbacks, Beetlejuice’s screen presence, and plot focus.
Read as one critic’s assessment, the review is best understood as a qualified recommendation for viewers receptive to the returning cast and Burton-style set pieces, paired with a clear warning that the title character and the family story share space with several distracting threads.
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