Harry Belafonte’s “Day-o (The Banana Boat Song),” the unofficial theme of Tim Burton’s delightfully morbid black comedy Beetlejuice, hits differently once it’s inevitably played in the new sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. In the 36-year-old original, the song is prominently used during a supernatural dance number that would be freakier if the characters being paranormally forced into it weren’t ultimately having a good time. In its follow-up, it turns mournful, sung by a choir of sad-eyed kids at the funeral of a character killed in a watery freak accident. The tonal switch decently encapsulates Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s approach in general. It dutifully hits beats fans of the first film might have expected, but often with a melancholic underlay suggesting that, for Burton, returning to the earliest feature-length distillation of his immediately recognizable macabre style is more bittersweet than a straightforward cause for celebration.
That it takes death and grief a little more seriously than last time shouldn’t suggest Beetlejuice Beetlejuice marks a pivot into no-fun seriousness. Among this sequel’s strengths is its way of recapturing its predecessor’s darkly comedic, anything-goes spirit — of being another death-preoccupied farce so consistently funny that you never feel depressed or really mind that there isn’t much by way of a cohesive narrative or three-dimensional characterization. Like its forebear, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is most of all a showcase for its up-for-anything ensemble, funhouse set design, winningly goopy-gory makeup effects, clever imaginings of the afterlife as an endlessly frustrating bureaucratic maze, and frenetic strain of haunted-house slapstick comedy. It wouldn’t all work as well if it didn’t feel like everybody was firing on all cylinders, having as good a time as we are playing in Burton’s sandbox.
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Peterson Reviews 