Budi Sutomo

Wow... They should've left the 1988 cult classic Beetlejuice alone. Even though Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was made by the same director and brought back a number of the same actors playing the same main characters, the "vibe" of the sequel couldn't be further from the original movie. The attitude, the boldness, the sharp tongue and wittiness —basically all the things that made the original movie a comedy classic — seems to be missing in the sequel. I found the character Beetlejuice in the original movie funny and strangely likeable. That's mainly because he was just so... wrong and unapologetic. I realize a lot of what the character spewed out back then in terms of words and gestures would not have passed today's wokeness standard. And that may or may not be rightly so — that's an entirely separate subject that I'm not here for. My point is, while Beetlejuice x2 has a lot of the same parts, it can't hold a candle to the original Beetlejuice. The story is slap dash at best, the funny lines fell flat and the dialogs felt lazy. The movie comes off very erratic in some parts, and seems dragging on in others. To borrow the idea from the movie, it seems like the essence of the original movie had hopped on the soul train for the great beyond, and never returned for the sequel.