Joker: Folie à Deux
I’m not usually compelled to ‘hate-watch’ something but this was such a huge box-office disaster that I was simply curious to see what on Earth could have gone wrong.
The first film was a huge success but looking back it seems like I wasn’t that enamoured with it1. Well this one interestingly enough serves mostly as an analysis of the reactions to the 2019 original, where a certain portion of the audience (supposedly) identified with the Joker and saw him as a cool anti-hero. Here Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is in prison, trying to find out if he’s really the Joker or just some schmuck.
It’s part prison film but also part courtroom drama part musical and part romance. In all these regards it almost overtly refuses to introduce any drama or stakes, with everything just sort of falling flat. That’s quite disappointing when you have Lady Gaga playing Harley Quinn (or ‘Lee Quinzel’ here), sorely under-utilised in her role both as an actress and as a singer.
Where the first film was about an anti-hero this is pretty much an anti-film. I don’t think it’s the total disaster people made it out to be, but it’s just too introspective and flat to ever really be a success. It sets out to annoy fans of the first film, which is quite an annoying thing to have to sit through because I don’t care either way.
But it’s no Madame Web2 in terms of box-office bombs. It’s a well made film with brilliant actors in it. I sort of liked the musical numbers. It’s reasonably interesting to see the film go beyond pure character study and explore how fandom and audiences can be unwittingly toxic and delusional.
That’s my defence of it, and I suspect time will be a lot kinder to this film that the immediate reaction to it betrays. I still can’t recommend it though, and if you do decide to sit through it brace yourself for a pretty dull last third and a very clumsy ending.