The lack of character arc, for anyone, is amazing. When we last saw Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), she escaped a near-wedding with Beetlejuice and was thriving in a quasi-foster care household, raised by the ghost Maitlands (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin), while her father Charles (Jeffrey Jones) and stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) continue to ignore her. The classic Boomer/Gen X family. In 2024, Lydia is a traumatized widow who can see ghosts, kinda like the kid from Sixth Sense, if Bruce Willis stuck him on a reality TV show.
I guess we're supposed to understand that Lydia is paralyzed from change based on her teenage PTSD over Beetlejuice, and her divorce from (and the subsequent death of) her husband? That would be an okay starting point if the events of the movie help her break out of her rut and emerge a liberated person, but it doesn't. If anything, she's more haunted at the end of the movie.
A Beetlejuice sequel could be about anything. Did Tim Burton decide to finally make one because he met Jenna Ortega, perfectly cast as Lydia's daughter Astrid? Maybe. Astrid is a sullen, moody teen, mortified that her mother is a laughingstock among her peer group, and resentful that Lydia can't/won't "see" her father's ghost - evidence enough that her mother is a fraud. This is a great starting place for Astrid, and it would be a great payoff when the trio is reunited later in the movie...if their reunion didn't feel awkward and forced, like the characters had never met before, instead of being family.
Finally, I am baffled at the intense focus upon the death of Charles Deetz. Actor Jeffrey Jones has been canceled over his conviction as a sex offender. Regardless of his importance to the movie, maybe his personal relationship with Burton, the character is a distraction from the movie. The prudent choice would be to write him out of the sequel. Instead, they go to a lot of trouble to include his character in the movie without ever showing Jones. These tricks are fun and clever, and would work great if I weren't thinking about Jones's crimes every time he "appears".
Indeed, the Maitlands are written out of the movie and are dismissed with one sentence. Since the movie was completed, Baldwin was cleared of all criminal charges stemming from the Rust movie shooting, and I personally have no problem with him. In my opinion, I wish they had made the Maitlands story a plot of the movie instead of Charles.
What's the spark that sends Beetlejuice back after Lydia? Through a silly confluence of events, Beetlejuice's ex-wife Monica Bellucci - Tim Burton's latest movie star girlfriend - is reanimated for revenge against Beetlejuice. Is that her finger Beetlejuice takes the wedding ring from in the first movie? In an early sequence, she slowly and grossly staple-guns her body back together, until she looks just like Sally in The Nightmare Before Christmas, with stitched-together staple scars winding across her face and body. Her character does not interact with the main cast until the very climax of the movie, where she is quickly dispatched.
Meanwhile, another new character is also off doing their own thing: Willem Dafoe - game for anything - plays an eager dead Hollywood actor, working as a afterlife detective. He also has no interaction with the main cast until the very end, and then when he bursts in on everyone, he's immediately frozen in place. Why were these characters even included if they don't participate in the plot?
It should tell us something that the movie is overcrowded with subplots featuring new characters, and it's still only a nice and tidy 104 minutes. The character I felt the most empathy for is Bob the head-shrunk afterlife customer support assistant manager. (at the Triplex with the boys)