I appreciate it when a film shoots for the stars like JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX does. Unfortunately this movie, as ambitious as it sets out to be, barely breaks the nearest window. It’s got a few moments of near-greatness; the beginning and the end. What’s in the middle is a mess. In short, it’s a sequel made by a director who has heard the complaints about JOKER and seems to want to correct at least some of them, some of the time, but maybe not. It’s a wishy-washy, weird (not in a good way) folly with show tunes and 60s-style classic pop songs shoe-horned into it.
Before we go any further, I need you to know that JOKER (2019) was also a 🤮 for me, but for completely different reasons. (You can read Aaron’s review of it here; he liked it a lot more than I did.) Director Todd Phillip’s first foray into a comic-book adaptation didn’t work for me on several levels. Namely, it’s not a Joker story, the iconic Batman villain. There’s no reason for the characters to be named after Batman-related characters when they have so little in common with them. Secondly, and probably even more importantly; JOKER asks us to root for an awful person, a violent, incel of a man who isn’t interesting and doesn’t deserve our empathy. I haven’t been excited for JOKER 2, but I was hopeful that the addition of Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn (known in the film as Lee Quinzel) and the idea that it’ll have a lot of music in it might make it better than the first.
In some ways, the sequel is better than the first. It’s still NOT a Joker movie. Again, other than character and location names, it has no business pretending to be part of the Bat-Family universe. But as I mentioned above, there are some really good moments. The intro serves to remind us of Joker’s roots as a comic-book character. This got me excited that maybe they were finally going to “get it” with “it” being the heart of who Joker really is. In Act 1, a friendship between Arthur Fleck/Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) and an Arkham guard named Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) is introduced. The scenes between Phoenix and Gleeson are some of the best in the movie. It’s too bad that as the story progresses, Sullivan fades into the background and eventually falls back into a lazy trope of a prisonguard-type character.
Lady Gaga does her best with the material given. I liked that Lee is given agency in a story that could have easily made her a weak, helpless woman. But she is not Harley Quinn/Harleen Quinzel. Nothing about her relationship with Fleck/Joker feels like it was inspired by the comics or Paul Dini’s and Bruce Timm’s creation. The filmmakers wanted to make a musical, without calling it a musical, and needed an actress who could sing. Lady Gaga was the natural choice. Another popular Batman character serves in a supporting role. Without critiquing the actor’s portrayal, this was the absolute most boring adaptation of this character I’ve ever seen on screen – film, TV, animated, live-action, etc. I guess Phillips didn’t want this character to steal any of the show at all, so they just did a good character (in the comics) dirty and made him a snoozefest. Zero personality. Zero charisma.
As I said before, the creators of JOKER heard our complaints about trying to portray a violent incel as sort of a hero. There are scenes and dialogue in JOKER 2 that practically scream “We heard you, and you’re wrong, just wait and see.” At least if you going for a bit, commit to that bit. You wanted Arthur/Joker to be a hero to the unknown, the unseen, the abused, and the maligned of society in the 2019 film. But who IS Arthur in this story? Is he Arthur? The Joker? Both? Neither? The new film wrestles with these questions and just when I thought – oh they’re about to pull it all together, it drops the ball. I don’t need storytellers to tell me how to feel about a movie. I don’t need them to answer all the questions. We, the audience, the spectators, have a responsibility to deconstruct art into whatever we want or need it to mean to us. Perhaps that’s what Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver were going for here. They wanted us to leave the theatre and ask big questions. JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX is just never strong enough or consistent enough for me to care. I did ask myself some questions when I left the screening, such as “Why was this movie ever made?” and “Wow, Warner Brothers needs to stop letting everyone with a crime drama slap the names of Batman characters onto it.” (I have a lot of critiques of Matt Reeve’s 2022 THE BATMAN and now HBO’s THE PENGUIN too. Just because you pulled the names and settings from DC Comics, doesn’t mean it feels like a comic-book adaptation.)
The greater Batman story and all the people (good, bad, and everyone in between) and places are my MOST FAVORITE comic-book properties. I applaud broad modifications of the universe when it works. The Christopher Nolan trilogy took a lot of liberties and still, it was wonderful. The current animated series HARLEY QUINN is another example of how you can mold these characters and still have them be interesting. Or even more recently, I adored season 1 of BATMAN: CAPED CRUSADER. I’m a defender of James Gunn’s THE SUICIDE SQUAD and Cathy Yan’s BIRDS OF PREY. Hell, I will even defend the failed 2002 television series BIRDS OF PREY and most of the Batman-adjacent TV shows that followed. Because even when they weren’t very good, they still felt inspired by this world that Bob Kane and Bill Finger created 85 years ago. Perhaps I’m just expecting too much from the guy who gave us THE HANGOVER trilogy.
JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX is exclusively in theatres starting on October 4, 2024. If you have to see it, wait until it streams. It will probably be on HBO before Christmas.
