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What does Tim Burton want to bring back from the dead? A cruel observer might say: his own career as a great filmmaker. The sneer needs to be qualified. Decades have passed since the golden age of Edward Scissorhands And Mars attacks!but Burton has always remained at least steadily employed. Still. Interest in the kind of pop-goth that made his name has not been what it used to be for years — until now, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

A belated sequel to the dizzying, morbid 1988 comedy, the film is Burton squared and in its entiretya wacky collection of ghosts, ghouls and weird nonsense. Consider it a seance, headlined by original cast members Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton.

For Keaton at least, the 36 years between films are barely noticeable, mostly because of his pale outfit as the annoying demon Betelgeuse, stranded in the afterlife. He and everyone else are still quickly reminded of the passage of time. If anyone is to blame for the new film, watch first Wednesdaythe modern hit riff on The Addams Family which Burton launched on Netflix in 2022. In the smallest surprise in movie history, that show’s expressionless young star, Jenna Ortega, now takes on the role of Ryder’s brooding daughter Lydia Deetz: once a teenage goth outsider herself, but lately a hapless TV ghost hunter.

Wednesday Burton must have given him his budget. The problem is what to do with it. The film is a frantic spaghetti of decentered subplots seemingly aimed at each member of a large focus group. In Burton’s heyday, the frenetic pace was great. Now the execution is chaotic and eager to please, the film spinning you in place until you’re dizzy and demanding to know if you’re having a good time yet.

Ryder and Ortega get a sentimental mother-daughter story; Catherine O’Hara, reprising her art-world maven role from the first film, twiddles her thumbs; Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe manage not to visibly check their watches in Halloween-style cameos. Keaton himself pops up occasionally, barely connected to the rest of the film. (It’s rarely a good sign when a film has to pause for 40 minutes to explain who the title character is.) These are clearly tough times for financiers Warner Bros. under embattled CEO David Zaslav, but can the studio really afford no more script editors?

Frustratingly, amid the long, unfunny stretches, there are moments when things click: glittering flashes of macabre slapstick, Justin Theroux sporting a nightmarish ponytail like a TV producer’s heel. And there’s still plenty of comic juice in the central premise, conceived by Burton when Ronald Reagan was president: death as an antique bureaucratic waiting room.

But despite the commercial importance of the Wednesday fans, much of the film feels stuck in that same eternal 80s: a movie about TV instead of podcasts, with spiderweb jokes about graffiti artists and a dig at social media that the influencers around me at the screening laughed at with uncertainty. Consider it a warning, kids. You’ll have to grow old before you can live your life.

★★☆☆☆

In cinemas in the UK and US from September 6