Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is no Beetlejuice, but in the end it’s got just enough [Tim] Burton juice.

“The movie is just a lightweight riff on Beetlejuice — a piece of fan service, really. It doesn’t give you the full monster-kitsch jolt that the original film had. Yet there’s good fan service and bad, and as stilted and gimcracky as it can sometimes be, I had a pretty good time [with it].

“Burton’s once-skewed way of looking at the world long ago got baked into ours (that’s one reason he has struggled, at times, to give his movies that same buzz). But if Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is mostly a lark, kind of like the current hit Broadway version of Beetlejuice, part of what the new movie delivers is honest nostalgia for the moment when Burton’s clown-spirit-from-hell sensibility still had a frisson of shock value.”

And yet BBC.com’s Nicholas Barber is creaming all over the sequel — “surpasses the original in almost every respect.”

I’m sorry but I don’t trust Barber, not for a second.