As excited as I was at the prospect of a sequel to the much-loved 1988 movie Beetlejuice, it took me more than a year to get around to watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice after it came out. Finally, my wife and I sat down on a quiet Saturday afternoon to see if it lived up to the original.

Well, yes and no.

The new movie is a lot of fun, and it pays homage to the original in a lot of cool ways. It makes brief mention of the original ghosts Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), who it turns out found a loophole in their haunting and "moved on," thus not appearing in this film. And while Jeffrey Jones -- who, in the original movie was laidback dad Charles Deetz -- was not brought back to play his character because of various unsavory legal issues, his character looms large despite being pronounced dead in the opening act. His death scene is reenacted through stop-motion animation, while in subsequent appearances in the afterlife his appearance is obscured because ... well, you'll understand if you see it. Needless to say, Jones is not in the movie but, for some reason, director Tim Burton still felt the need to feature the character prominently. Frankly, it would have made more sense to lead with the phone call announcing his death and just leave him out of the movie after that.

Returning are Winona Ryder as goth girl Lydia Deetz all grown up, Catherine O'Hara as her weirdly artistic stepmother Delia Deetz and, of course, Michael Keaton as the titular Beetlejuice, the grossly persistent demonic dead guy. Lydia, Delia and Lydia's estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) come to the Deetz home (formerly the Maitland home, aka the Ghost House) in a small, bucolic Connecticut town to bury Charles properly. With them is Rory (Justin Theroux), Lydia's off-putting boyfriend and producer on her popular reality ghost show.

As the funeral progresses and Delia works through the oddly self-involved artistic expression of her grief, Rory figures the time is right to propose to Lydia. Astrid storms off and meets a boy, Jeremy (Arthur Conti), who, it turns out, has ... issues. And, in the afterlife, Beetlejuice's soul-sucking ex-wife Delores (Monica Belluci) overcomes centuries of confinement and decapitation and decides to find that no-good man of hers for -- well, no doubt something nefarious. And Beetlejuice, who you might remember tried to marry Lydia in the first movie to escape death, thinks that same strategy might work now to escape a dead woman scorned.

Without giving away any more of the story, let's just say some living people end up in the afterlife who shouldn't be there, and vice versa. Astrid's deceased father (Santiago Cabrera) makes an appearance, and a dead actor-turned-cop (Willem Dafoe) chases some folks.

It's fun, yes. And it's great seeing Keaton, Ryder and O'Hara pick up these roles again after so many years, and Ortega is a perfect addition to the cast. But ... the movie doesn't have the same freshness or vivacity that the first one had in spades -- in part because it lacks the grounding presence of the Maitlands. The story is less focused, packed with too many plot elements, concerned more with spectacle and nostalgia than plot. For some parts of the movie, I was actually kind of ... bored. Also, I think maybe the soul-sucking menace of Delores might have been a bit much for a Beetlejuice movie, which typically provides scares that are a little less horrifying.

Poor Bob.

While nothing could top the use of Harry Belafonte's "Day-O" in the original, this one tries with a little disco: Richard Harris's version of "MacArthur Park" and the Bee Gees' "Tragedy." Nice efforts but not as good, and overdone.

At the end, of the day, I'm glad Beetlejuice Beetlejuice exists, but it's nowhere near as clever, original or high-spirited as the singular Beetlejuice. Unless someone comes up with a truly remarkable script -- or a convincing way to de-age Baldwin and Davis -- I hope they don't go for a trifecta.