Joker: Folie à Deux (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

JOKER: FOLIE Á DEUX (2024)

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz, Harry Lawtey, Steve Coogan, Ken Leung, Bill Smitrovich, Jacob Lofland, Leigh Gill, Sharon Washington, Gattlin Griffith, Mac Brandt, Tim Dillon, George Carroll, Mike Houston, John Lacy, Sam Wren Vincent, Troy Metcalf, Jimmy Walker Jr., G.L. McQueary and Brian Donahue.

Screenplay by Scott Silver & Todd Phillips.

Directed by Todd Phillips.

Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. 138 minutes. Rated R.

I know I’m kind of in the minority on this point, but I can’t even start to tell you how much I hated Todd Phillips’ 2019 movie Joker.

Five years later, here comes the follow-up, and it’s like Phillips said to himself: Hmm… how can we make this story even more annoying? I know! Let’s make it a musical. Better yet, let’s not even completely commit fully to the genre and make it sort of a stealth musical. The cast will start singing inappropriately, but mostly in a relatively subdued manner. None of the other trappings of the style – the dancing, the frenetic movement, the wild visuals, the boisterous chorus lines – need to be used. And we won’t even write our own music, we’ll just dust off some 60s and 70s pop songs and overly familiar standards from the Great American Songbook.

On the plus side, this time around, I don’t think I’ll be all that lonely in hating Joker: Folie à Deux. Because I really, really did hate it. If possible, this sequel is even more unbearable than the original. Imagine that.

I can’t imagine anyone actually liking Joker: Folie à Deux – then again, I felt that way about the first one, too, so maybe I’m not the best judge. Nonetheless, early buzz on the sequel seems pretty negative, so hopefully it’s not just me.

I take no joy in saying that. I actually was rather looking forward to the original Joker movie until I saw it. Because the truth is, Batman is a relatively dull superhero, but the one thing he always did have going for himself were the best villains. And a movie about arguably the most interesting of Batman’s villains could be amazing.

It’s just not this series. 

At least the first Joker had something of a storyline. Granted, it was a pretty blatant rip-off of Martin Scorsese’s 1983 cult favorite The King of Comedy – they even cast that film’s star Robert De Niro in a major supporting role to make the connection even more obvious – but it was something of a plot. 

Joker: Folie à Deux, on the other hand, is nearly two and a half hours (!!!) of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) being psychoanalyzed and mistreated in an insane asylum. (Like we didn’t know he was mentally deranged from the first time he appeared on screen in the first film.) Then it switches to being a courtroom drama about Arthur’s criminal trial for the mayhem he committed in the first film, although it plays out like an episode of Law & Order: Super Villains Unit.

While in the asylum, he meets his one true love, Lee Quinzel, who becomes Harley Quinn. (Of course, in the first Joker movie, Arthur imagined Zazie Beetz’ character – who reappears here as a witness for the prosecution – was his one true love, so Arthur isn’t too reliable in matters of the heart.) Lady Gaga is okay, if way too subdued, as the future Harley. She certainly won’t make anyone forget Margot Robbie’s powerhouse performances in the same role.

My biggest problem with Joker: Folie à Deux is the same as my problem with the first film. In both of these films, the Joker is played as a sad, pathetic, miserable loser who has life take a massive dump on him throughout the entire running time. Is this really supposed to be the guy who is going to be Batman’s greatest nemesis?

At least in the original film, Arthur eventually snapped and went on a violent killing spree, which was not a great, moral or relatable storyline, but at least he did something. In Folie à Deux, any violence or mayhem which he commits is mostly done in fantasy sequences, which just makes him seem even sadder and more impotent in real life.

After it was over, someone who apparently enjoyed the movie much more than I did tried to convince me that Folie à Deux is a movie that shows the depths a man will go to for love. However, his relationship with Lee is so dysfunctional, so toxic, so driven by mania, that it’s hard to root for a happy ever after for these two crazy kids. They – and the world – are probably better off with them separate. We know that is not the case from the comics, although the ending does put that in doubt.

As I said in the original review five years ago, Joker has been known to inspire many complicated emotional reactions. Pity has never really been one of them.

However, even more than I pitied the Joker in these two movies, I mostly pity myself because I have now wasted about four and a half hours of my life watching this sad saga.

Jay S. Jacobs

Copyright ©2024 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: October 3, 2024.