Joker: Folie à Deux
The joke’s on us
Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix prank moviegoers with this dismal sequel.
After murdering six people, including one on national TV, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is awaiting trial in Arkham State Hospital. It’s a brutal place, where the guards beat inmates, the facilities are filthy, and people are essentially left to rot.
But, hey, they have a music class!
The most brutal of the guards, Jackie (Brendan Gleeson), decides to sign up Arthur for music class in the low-security ward. He takes time out of his day to escort Arthur there and sit through mentally unbalanced people performing the Burt Bacharach songbook.
Why?
Don’t ask questions, Joker: Folie à Deux has no interest in answering them, nor in logic in any conceivable way.
But in music class, Arthur meets Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga) and falls madly in love. Lee is a Joker superfan, seemingly obsessed with the movement Arthur started and what he means to society. She’s sad to see Arthur listening to his attorneys and reflecting on his murders with sadness and empathy. She offers to remind him of his former self, what made him great.
Can Lee reawaken the Joker in Arthur? Is Arthur ready to embrace the madness? Did no one at Warner Brothers watch this steaming pile of celluloid before dropping it in a lit paper bag and leaving it at theaters around the country?
First, I would like to congratulate director Todd Phillips for proving to be a true Renaissance man. I thought The Joker was overrated Martin Scorsese-cribbing trash, but with this sequel, Phillips has outdone himself. Not merely content to be a derivative director of middling comedies and dramas, Phillips set out to prove with Folie à Deux that he is also a terrible director of courtroom thrillers, jailhouse dramas, and musicals. It’s impressive to commit yourself to being bad at so many things. Phillips was helped with his race to the bottom with a script that feels like a boring Madlib. It took three people to write a story that is both dull and incoherent. The movie throws away any part of the original movie that was interesting (like Arthur’s army of incels and the unrest in Gotham) and focuses instead on…making Arthur the most pathetic creature on the planet.
The courtroom scenes are monotonous, the musical numbers are clunky, and any semblance of romance between Lee and Arthur feels forced and awkward. As my seatmate asked when the credits rolled: Who is this movie for? It’s not going to satisfy comic fans. Musical nerds will sneer at the production and sound mixing. Drama fans will wonder where the plot and character development are. And finally, even incels making angry YouTube videos will have very little to glom onto in this flick. This movie is the most viscerally unpleasant thing I’ve seen in the theaters this year and I watched Demi Moore dissolve into a pile of pustule-filled flesh last month.
But Phillips isn’t the only person who deserves blame for this mess of a movie. As the titular Deux of the film both Phoenix and Gaga deliver performances that are the cinematic equivalent of a week-old dead fish.
It stinks.
Phoenix dubiously won the Oscar for his first turn as the Joker, and while he’s back in skeletal form for this sequel, all the air seems to be let out of his performance. He’s flat (not just when he’s singing), like even he knows what a turkey this movie is. There’s no spark, even when he’s screaming. His only two moves this time around are giant kicked-puppy eyes and snarling Joker screaming. He flings himself between the two like a man who couldn’t refuse a giant paycheck from a floundering movie studio. The whole performance is just rather embarrassing and highlights how little he can do with a terrible script and inept direction.
As for Gaga, she still can sing her heart out. Unfortunately, when she’s not belting out a Gershwin tune, she’s the dead-eyed foil to Phoenix’s mawkish criminal. Her delivery is devoid of any sort of nuance or emotion. In a better film that might be part of the character, but here it just adds to the juggernaut of terrible that is Folie à Deux. Gaga is great when led by a director with a real sense of emotional truth, but she’s lost here among the ugly aesthetics and terrible scripting. Her agent should give Bradley Cooper a call, both of them could use a good flick after their latest projects.
Any spark of life or interest the first film generated is well and truly squashed by this sloppy, uninteresting sequel. The subjects of social injustice, economic disparity, and how easily lonely desperate people can follow troubling public figures are all left by the wayside so Phoenix and Gaga can enact a flaccid romance with lackluster music. It’s almost as if this sequel was a soulless cash grab instead of a well-thought-out continuance of a nuanced story.
Verdict: Don’t. It’s not even worth making fun of.
Joker: Folie à Deux is rated R and available in theaters Oct. 4.
