★★★☆☆

There is a shot about halfway through Beetlejuice Beetlejuice that reminds you what cinema can do. Teenager Astrid, played by Jenna Ortega, breaks off from her first kiss with a look of wonder in her eyes. It’s a tender moment, bursting with adolescent delight, a reminder of director Tim Burton’s gift for capturing sensations on film. Sadly, the rest of the movie fails to live up to it.

This is a sequel to Burton’s 1988 horror-comedy Beetlejuice, which starred Michael Keaton as a demon who hires himself out to ghosts to torment the living. It was notable for launching the careers of both the director and the then-teenage Winona Ryder, who returns here.

This is definitely a sequel, rather than a reboot, and it has a possibly misplaced confidence in how much the audience will remember about the previous film. Ryder’s character, Lydia, is now a TV ghost-hunter, and mum to Ortega’s grumpy teen. They return to the haunted house of the first film for a funeral, and Halloween hi-jinks ensue.

It was a long time ago, and the sequel fails to reanimate the corpse

The result is defiantly OK. With the exception of Burton, everyone involved has done better work in the past decade. The story is of Lydia’s relationship with her daughter, with the plot driven by the possibility that Astrid is about to get stuck in the afterlife. But none of it raises the heartrate. Ryder held the screen as a distraught mother in Stranger Things. Here there is never any sense that things won’t work out in the end. Neither, beyond Willem Dafoe’s turn as a policeman of the deceased, is there much to laugh at.

It’s hard not to raise an eyebrow at a sequel released 36 years after the original. With Top Gun: Maverick, the result was terrific, but the thought still escaped that we were watching Hollywood spend millions to let Tom Cruise pretend he’s still 24. But if aspects of that film are best explained by a psychiatrist, to explain Beetlejuice Beetlejuice you only need an accountant. We are, yet again, seeing the effects of Hollywood’s current terror of making original films.

It wasn’t always like this. Just look at what else came out in 1988: Heathers, Big, Die Hard, Bull Durham, Twins, The Naked Gun, Midnight Run, Rain Man, The Accused, Mississippi Burning, Dangerous Liaisons. Today, many of these would probably be pitched as prestige TV series. Filmmakers need to find a way to make the case again for entertaining hundred-minute stories.

Beetlejuice was a fun film with what then felt like an original twist: what if the ghosts in a house wanted to exorcise the living? But it was a long time ago, and the sequel fails to reanimate the corpse.