A female-centric movie for the Wednesday Addams audience, this film is overstuffed and unfocused. The team seem afraid of never getting another shot at this. So, they crammed as many plot ideas as they could into the running time. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t.

The Deetz women are not having an easy time of it. Lydia (Ryder) has grown from a flourishing teenage goth girl into a timid celebrity medium. Seeing ghosts is not a gift. Beetlejuice has been tormenting her from the periphery of her vision for decades. Lydia is an unusual protagonist for a movie like this. There is no expectation that her life will get better here. It did in the first movie, but now we find a woman weighed down not by a problem but by the disappointments in her life.

This is the most adult of approaches to take with the material because none of the characters change. No one gets better. No one is redeemed. No one has a conversion on the road to Damascus. This lack of change isn't bad for Delia. In a great performance by Catherine O'Hara, she has perfected her taste and artistry. But, she is still hilariously shallow. Now a widow, she finds her husband's death both inconvenient and heartbreaking. Jenna Ortega's Astrid is more activist than artist. She has friction with her mother, Lydia. She's so strong and independent that she falls in love with a guy with great hair overnight. Well come on, he listens to great music and is tall. If he'll go to a protest with her he's the dream.

Like the first movie, repairing the imperfect family is the connective thread throughout the story. And like the first movie Michael Keaton here does Beetlejuice as a chaotic force. But he doesn’t feel as present here as he did in the past. We get several musical numbers; I particularly enjoyed the underworld train one. The production design looks good. The classic movie house looks impressive.

But, as I put in the opening paragraph, this is a movie for those who want more Wednesday quirkiness. It lacks sharp edges because the Beetlejuice of 1988 would be canceled if he showed up again in 2024. Studios are afraid modern audiences will trash their movies. I was in a theater filled with Gen X and older. Studios might want to rethink who the audience that pays to watch movies is.