Producers: Marc Toberoff, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Tommy Harper and Tim Burton   Director: Tim Burton   Screenplay: Alfred Gough and Miles Millar  Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti, Santiago Cabrera and Burn Gorman   Distributor: Warner Bros.

Grade: C

Dutifulness and desperation are the main ingredients in Tim Burton’s disappointing long-delayed sequel to his 1988 effects-laden comedy.  Though “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which for convenience’s sake will be termed “B2,” tries furiously to replicate its predecessor’s explosively loony vibe, the anarchic air it fashions comes across as more manufactured than natural–in Freudian terms, you might say that while “Beetlejuice” actually embodied the unleashed id, “B2” is more like the ego’s calculated attempt to recreate that effect artificially.

And it does so doggedly, most notably by bringing back many of the characters from the first movie—though its real leads, Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) are absent, while another, Charles Deetz (professionally cancelled Jeffrey Jones), shows up only in different forms (one Claymation, the other grotesquely attenuated, in what could be a nod to another Burton movie, “Sleepy Hollow”).

Fully present are Michael Keaton’s manic title demon, Charles’ second wife Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and his goth, ghost-seeing daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), who becomes the de facto center of “B2,” along with new characters, her insufferable would-be fiancé Rory (Justin Theroux) and Astrid (Jenna Ortega), her daughter by her first marriage.  (Lydia’s first husband–Astrid’s father Richard, played by Santiago Cabrera–is dead, but not forgotten.)  A slew of other new figures surround them, including Beetlejuice’s wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), a literal soul-sucker recently reconstituted from her severed body parts among the dead; Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), a former B-movie actor who has assumed the role of a hard-boiled detective among the ghosts on the other side; and Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a local teen who romances Astrid but has secrets in his closet.

The convoluted plot arises from Charles’ comically horrible death by shark and the effort by Rory, the producer of Lydia’s paranormal TV show “Ghost House,” to use the occasion to convince her to marry him—much to the disgust of both Delia and Astrid; and from Lydia’s effort to protect Astrid from what she sees as the danger posed by Jeremy, which will eventually force her to summon Beetlejuice back into service.  Beetlejuice, meanwhile, is trying to get Lydia to marry him, even as vengeance-seeking Delores pursues him, since he chopped her to bits (though, to be fair, she was bent on poisoning him). To add to the chaos, Jackson is pursuing Delores, who’s leaving too many ghosts fully dead in her avenging wake.

If all that isn’t clear, be assured that Burton, along with screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (who previously worked with Burton, as well as Ortega, on the Netflix Addams Family series “Wednesday”) and editor Jay Prychidny, does a reasonably good job of keeping things comprehensible, if hardly logical.  But then logic is not a quality these movies are concerned with; the goal is to be visually outlandish and outrageously funny. 

“B2,” like its processor, manages the former with images that deliberately mimic the style of the 1988 movie; the visual effects supervised by Angus Bickerton, along with the animatronic gizmos and makeup supervised by Neal Scanlan, don’t ignore the CGI advances of the last thirty-five years, but they try to make you think they do, and the result has a tactile, hand-made quality that feeds boomer nostalgia for simpler times.  (So do the shout-outs to other films: the ending, for instance, is a homage to Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” down to the cut from Pino Donaggio’s score.)  Mark Scruton’s production design and Colleen Atwood’s costumes are wildly colorful, and Haris Zambarloukos’s cinematography clothes the overall result in a brilliant sheen, while pausing to portray the flashback honeymoon of Beetlejuice and Delores as a black-and-white parody of an old foreign film.  Danny Elfman’s score is a throwback to his work for the earlier movie, too. (Rest assured “The Banana Boat Song” is reprised in curious fashion, while the big climax gives “MacArthur Park” similarly spectacular treatment.)

It’s in the “outrageously funny” area that the movie falls short.  Sometimes that’s the result of simply going too far in the direction of grotesquerie.  There will be those, for example, who find the animatronic baby Beetlejuice featured in a couple of sequences fiendishly hilarious, but one suspects that an equal number will consider it rather disgusting. Other effects are also more creepy than amusing. 

For the most part, though, the problem is that the writing just isn’t clever enough; too often the attempts at verbal humor simply fall flat—the entire Rory subplot is pretty much a bummer, and it’s not helped by Theroux’s performance, which is over-the-top sleaze-ball but never gets past sitcom level.  Dialogue that should fizz simply lies there, uninspired; it’s hard to think of a single line allotted to Wolf that’s a zinger, despite the frantic efforts of Dafoe to sell his scenes.  Even Keaton gets laughs more from his cracked delivery and physical gyrations than from anything Beetlejuice says.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t moments which hit perfectly–one, for instance, in which influencers get their just deserts. Or that the cast, even the hapless Theroux, don’t give their all.  Keaton, O’Hara and Dafoe throw themselves into the zany goings-on madly, trying to transform material that remains resolutely inferior into comedy gold.  Ryder, Ortega, Conti, Cabrera and Burn Gorman (as a befuddled minister) are more subdued, but all do what’s demanded of them, as does Bellucci, whose Vampira-like Delores is really more successful in concept than in execution.  There’s an extended cameo by one of Keaton’s old “Batman” co-stars that doesn’t work at all, however.

In the end, “B2” feels like a check-the-boxes project, assembled from leftover parts (like Delores) rather than ones imaginatively created fresh and new.  It will satisfy die-hard fans ready to enjoy anything that tries to recapture the spirit of a long-time favorite, but sadly it oozes the second-rate quality that has marked most of Burton’s later efforts, rather than the madcap brilliance of his earlier ones.