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.

Producers: David Boies, Kevin M. Brennan, Shannon Houchins, Chris Parker, Zack Schiller and Dylan Sellers  Director: Potsy Ponciroli   Screenplay: Mike Vukadinovich   Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Himesh Patel, Lily James, Tim Blake Nelson, Uzo Aduba, Nina Arianda, Jim Gaffigan, José Yazpik, Joey Lauren Adams, Simon Rex, Traci Lords, Neva Joan Howell and Yingling Zhu    Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

Move the locale from the freezing Midwest of “Fargo,” to a faceless town on an island off the coast of North Carolina and you’ll have some idea of what Potsy Ponciroli’s “Greedy People” aspires to.  But by piling bad choice on bad choice and corpse upon corpse, the would-be dark comedy grows ever more overburdened with compromised characters; along the way it also forgets to be funny.

The town where the action occurs is called Providence, perhaps to suggest that everything that happens is preordained.  (It was actually shot by Eric Koretz, without much distinction, in Southport, North Carolina. The bland production design by Chad Keith and costumes by Brianna Quick certainly don’t make the place look attrative.)  A new cop has been added to the force by Captain Murphy (Uzo Aduba)—nervous Will Shelley (Himesh Patel), who had some trouble at his last posting.  He and his pregnant wife Paige (Lily James) are still moving into their house when he’s off for his first day on the job with his voluble, volatile partner Terry Brogan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who spends most of his day cadging free cups of coffee from the locals and enjoying afternoon quickies with Yu Yan (Yingling Zhu), while her husband’s away and Will waits in the patrol car by the curb.

That explains why Will’s alone when a call comes in, and he has to proceed solo to a house where a break-in is supposedly underway.  There he encounters buxom housewife Virginia Chetlo (Traci Lords), who’s frightened by his intrusion and gets into a tussle with him.  When they crash into a table, she’s fatally injured, breaking the first rule Brogan had given his new partner before going off for his tryst: “Don’t kill anybody.”

Unwilling to shoulder the consequences, the two cops decide to stage a burglary to blame Virginia’s death on a thief, but in the process find a stash of a million dollars and scheme to steal it for themselves.  What they don’t know is that Virginia’s husband Wally (Tim Blake Nelson), the local shrimp entrepreneur, had left the cash as payment to a killer called The Columbian (José Yazpik) he’s hired to off his wife: he’s been having an affair with his secretary Debra (Nina Arianda) and wants to be free of his marital impediment.  Now The Columbian, arriving after the fact and finding his money gone, is demanding his fee anyway, though Chetlo thinks he’s being double-billed.

That’s most of the folks in the chain of misfortune the complicated plot offers up for ridicule.  Others include The Irishman (Jim Gaffigan), a second hired killer in the tiny burg, who boasts a mailbox with his nom de guerre on it where his clients drop off their payments; Keith Crawford (Simon Rex), a dim-bulb masseur who knows what the cops did; and his domineering mother (Neva Joan Howell).

There are some mildly amusing moments in “Greedy People”—Nelson makes a proper doofus, though he doesn’t come close to William H. Macy, whose turn in “Fargo” is the obvious inspiration for Wally, and the relationship between Keith and his know-it-all mother is good for a few chuckles.  But otherwise the humor mostly fails to register—Aduba is nice enough (with poignant bookending scenes in her home), but Murphy is no Marge Gunderson, and even Gaffigan can’t do much with The (underwritten) Irishman.

As a result the movie becomes little more than a nasty catalogue of human folly and cascading death, played out by writer Mike Vukadinovich and director Ponciroli with a decidedly blunt satirical knife and haltingly edited by Jamie Kirkpatrick. But it’s difficult to care about characters being knocked off when they’ve barely been introduced.  All the cast do adequate work trying to fill in the sketches the script provides them with (Patel and James work especially hard, though the writing does them no favors) but there’s only one standout—Gordon-Levitt, who brings real ferocity and menace to the unpredictable Brogan.  Except in a few opening scenes, though, the performance is more frightening than amusing, and by the last reel it feels like he belongs in an unabashed film noir.   

As to those responsible for “Greedy People,” they might take to heart something The Irishman says to a potential client: “You can know you’re not good, which is better than believing you are.”