With more and more legacy sequels having come out in the past couple of years,

audiences have been gathering opinions on them and their worth.

Top Gun: Maverick was able to live up to the hype, Matrix Resurrection did not.

Was “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” able to please audiences 36 years after the original?

I certainly think so.

For the first time a couple of weeks ago, I watched the first Beetlejuice film from 1988 and thoroughly enjoyed it. I am typically not a fan of director Tim Burton’s work, but I thought it was a fun dark comedy, even though it was all about death.

The cast was stellar, but did the returning cast show up like they did in the original?

Yeah, they totally did. Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz, Catherine O’Hara as her mother Delia Deetz, and Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice himself all gave great performances. And newcomers Jenna Ortega as Astrid Deetz, Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson, Monica Bellucci as Beetlejuice’s wife, Arthur Conti as Jeremy Frazier and Justin Theroux as Rory all greatly added to the film.

Like the first one, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a fun dark comedy. However, in my opinion, the sequel did much better with emotional beats than the first installment or even most Burton films.

O’Hara was definitely the highlight of the film. She actually did better in this film than she did in the original. Her energy was doubled, and every line that came out of her mouth got a laugh from me. Ryder and Keaton, as always, had great chemistry and it made me very happy to see them on the big screen together again. Ryder and Ortega were also very believable as mother and daughter.

My only complaint about the film is that there are way too many characters – 24 named characters are listed online! They all served their purpose well, but I felt as if we couldn’t spend the time with a character we loved because we had to focus on four other characters who didn’t do much at all.

Overall, the film was a lot of fun and I felt like it did justice to the original. I would give this film a 7/10.