Nearly 40 years after he captured the imaginations of Gen X goths everywhere with Beetlejuice, its sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, is a return to form for Tim Burton. After a series of duds from Alice in Wonderland to his Dumbo remake, the director’s work on the Netflix series Wednesday seemingly reawakened Burton’s enthusiasm and sense of fun. Instead of the usual CGI slop of modern special effects, in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice he opts for practical effects and sets, including some animatronic creatures that seem destined to become an audience favorite. Like the original Beetlejuice, this sequel is a bizarre clash of disparate stories—some are satisfying, others don’t withstand scrutiny. In fact, some subplots are so utterly superfluous that they nearly derail the film entirely. It’s the palpable goodwill of the cast and crew that smooths over these rough spots. It is a minor miracle the original Beetlejuice even exists in the first place thanks to its strangeness and defiance of simple categorization, and so it is easy to root for a return to its macabre, cheeky sensibility.

When we last saw Lydia (Winona Ryder), she was a strange and unusual high school student living in a haunted house with her father, Charles (Jeffrey Jones), and stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara). We meet them again in 2024, after Charles dies unexpectedly and the mostly estranged Lydia and Delia return to the house to mourn him. This is where Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s script quickly dispatches actors from the first film: You may recall that Jones has rarely acted, and rightly so, since becoming a registered sex offender, while Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin have aged beyond the married ghosts permanently stuck in their 30s. No matter, since the sequel supplies a host of new characters, including Lydia’s sullen teenage daughter, Astrid (Wednesday star Jenna Ortega, a worthy successor to Ryder), along with Lydia’s boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux). As this confluence of characters descends on the old house, it awakens Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), the uncouth bio-exorcist who still pines for Lydia. A strange turn of events leaves Astrid in the underworld, so a desperate Lydia has no choice but to ask her demonic ex-fiance for help.

There is a lot to manage here, including Beetlejuice’s disgruntled ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), so sometimes it feels like Burton is directing traffic rather than a film. He bounces across multiple sets and planes of existence, so it is no surprise that his film is most engaging when characters are given time to breathe. O’Hara makes the most of her dialogue-driven comic scenes, playing a cliche of a pretentious modern artist with her head in the clouds, and it is all the disarming when she sees through the facade of Lydia, Astrid, and others with a witty one-liner. Other characters are nearly dead on arrival: Theroux stumbles through a thankless, unsalvageable character, but at least he has many lines that help set Lydia’s arc in motion. All the subplots and characters are ultimately a blessing in disguise. They never take up too much screen time, and Burton is hurtling toward his next set piece before the audience can lose their patience.

Maybe the most brilliant thing about Beetlejuice was its vision of the afterlife. Instead of fluffy clouds or constant hellfire, Burton imagines a shabby, green-hued bureaucracy where all the ghosts and dead people use immortality to sharpen their cynicism. There is a lot of the same imagination here, including an office where Beetlejuice manages a team of head-shrunk office drones who have their mouths sewn shut. Practical effects make these hapless bureaucrats come alive, proving that actors like Keaton do better work when they can react to something physical, rather than some CGI creature added in postproduction. The most expressive ghost is Bob, the leader of Beetlejuice’s office, and Burton portrays Bob like a loyal, sad puppy. At the screening I attended, I could feel the audience identify and fall in love with Bob—he just might become a perennial favorite Halloween costume. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice also uses animatronics to capture the sandworms, the bizarre Dune-like creatures from the original film. They don’t look real in any conventional sense, but still have a tactile quality that looks like they’re crafted with joy and patience, rather than rushed.

If Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is lacking any quality from the first film, it is a sense of sophistication. The original may have been embraced by younger audiences, despite the script including jokes and references that went over their heads. Ghosts casually referred to their own suicides, Beetlejuice talked about his time at Juilliard, and a Dick Cavett cameo gave a better sense of Delia’s bohemian art world than anything O’Hara’s character says. Just take a look at Cavett’s kiss-off line from the first Beetlejuice: “Delia, you are a flake. You have always been a flake. If you insist on frightening people, do it with your sculpture.” Gough and Millar do not let anyone here sound so erudite, and instead lean in to crass gags provided by Keaton’s manic performance, along with his ability to transform at will. A better script would mix the urbane with the uncouth, providing a kind of balance. And while there are some strange sequences—like a sudden shift to black-and-white Giallo-esque horror—Burton would rather please his fans than potentially confuse them.

No one who sees this film should expect tight plotting. For all the goodwill Burton earns with his collaborators, there is something brusque about how he resolves certain plot threads. Beetlejuice does not let anyone say his name three times, except when it is the most convenient for the plot. Bellucci adds glamor to the action, and yet her character is completely inessential, to say nothing of Willem Dafoe as a supernatural cop who hams it up whenever he’s on camera. It is a testament to Burton—with a major assist from composer Danny Elfman, returning with his iconic score—that so much of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice succeeds despite its stumbles. (At City Paper, we can only imagine that the need to win over audiences made him reunite with Elfman despite several allegations of sexual misconduct made against the composer, but it doesn’t say much about Burton as a human.)  

At its core, Beetlejuice has always been a “hang out movie,” the kind you put on and enjoy almost as background noise, but also the kind you start watching midway through and cannot help but finish. When the musical sequences are more memorable than the plot itself, what befalls Lydia and her family is practically incidental. As The Handbook for the Recently Deceased assures us, death is never the end.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (PG-13, 104 minutes) opens in area theaters on Sept. 6.