By MICHAEL GINGOLD

Starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar
Warner Bros.

Since, as we all know, saying Beetlejuice’s name three times is how you bring him from the world of the dead into ours, the title of BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is more appropriate than its creators intended. The film only goes partway toward successfully resurrecting the beloved character, getting all the atmosphere and visual elements right while surrounding him with an overly busy plot containing too many supporting players.

Given all the living and dead folks brought back from the original BEETLEJUICE, it’s unfortunate that the returnees don’t include two of the most crucial principals from the 1988 film: newly minted ghosts Adam and Barbara Maitland. They provided a solid emotional center amidst the developing madness, and it was through them that we discovered the land of the unliving and its byzantine bureaucracies, and experienced the cheerful vulgarities of Betelgeuse, a.k.a. Beetlejuice. Similarly, you could feel and share the joy Michael Keaton was having in cutting loose and finding out how much bad behavior he could get away with as “the ghost with the most.”

Keaton slips back into Beetlejuice’s diseased skin with ease in BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE. As he growls and insinuates and wisecracks his way across the screen, you’d never know it’s been over 35 years since he previously played the role. Yet the screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, from a story by the duo and Seth Grahame-Smith, doesn’t give him enough that’s fresh or, in the context of a follow-up, adventurous to do. While Beetlejuice isn’t exactly playing the greatest hits here, he doesn’t hold much surprise either, and like everyone else in the film, he becomes a pawn of the story when he should be dominating it.

The Maitlands, who essentially co-adopted Lydia Deetz at the end of the first movie, aren’t the only absent parental figures in BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE. It involves not one but two deceased dads: Charles Deetz (thus avoiding the thorny issue of casting Jeffrey Jones) and the father of Lydia’s teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega). The grown-up Lydia (Winona Ryder) now hosts a paranormal-investigation show, and despite her lifetime devotion to tracking ghosts, she freaks out when she starts receiving visions of Beetlejuice. Astrid, meanwhile, is estranged from both Lydia and her classmates at a girls’ school, but Charles’ death occasions a tetchy reunion between the two, and with Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara), Lydia’s mom and Astrid’s grandma, in Winter River, Connecticut, along with Lydia’s producer and boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux).

Meanwhile, down in the wacko underworld, Beetlejuice has to deal with Delores (Monica Bellucci), his long-ago-dispatched ex-wife who has literally put herself back together to come after him. He also becomes a target of Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), an afterlife law-enforcement agent and former actor channeling the cheesy action-movie heroes he played when he was alive. And in Winter River, Astrid finds potential romance with Jeremy (Arthur Conti), who shares her devotion to the supernatural. There are a pair of incipient weddings, various characters plotting and effecting crossovers into or out of the spirit world, and so much going on in general that it’s hard to stay invested in it, or stay focused on what the stakes are.

That’s a shame, since director Tim Burton clearly enjoyed his return to this oddball universe, and he and his cohorts have packed the frames with macabre/comic details. Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, production designer Mark Scruton, costume designer Colleen Atwood and creature/makeup effects supervisor Neal Scanlan are all newcomers to this universe, yet perfectly recapture the original’s mood and feel while contributing all manner of fresh, strange and gruesome sights. (Danny Elfman, of course, returns to give the goings-on a properly jaunty/scary musical accompaniment.) Returning to the scene of one of his first glories has freed Burton up to be more experimental than he’s been in a while, and two of the highlights are the stop-motion-style sequence revealing how Charles met his end, and the flashback revealing Beetlejuice and Delores’ backstory, done in black-and-white-Gothic, subtitled-Italian, full Mario Bava style.

And then, after this killer intro, Delores doesn’t have much to do except lurk around the periphery, sucking the souls out of a few secondary victims. She’s a great villain in search of a storyline worthy of her, and that deficiency is true of a lot of the living and the dead in BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE. The manic inventiveness of the design and craft contributions needed a more disciplined narrative to support it, and instead the movie is all over the place in a way that undercuts the entertainment value. On a more basic level, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE just doesn’t generate the laughs its predecessor did; a good deal of it is funny peculiar instead of funny ha-ha, including the big climactic setpiece, which is clearly supposed to be the sequel’s answer to ’88’s “Day-O” number (it’s even teased the same way during the opening logos) but lacks its sense of delightful surprise.

Like Keaton, Ryder and O’Hara effortlessly get back into character while also bringing their roles emotionally up to date, while Ortega demonstrates once again (after WEDNESDAY) how perfectly suited she is to the Burtonian milieu. The director has said that exploring the three generations of these mothers and daughters was the key appeal of this sequel for him, and the final product leaves one wishing it had received fuller emphasis, without so many distractions.