Director Todd Phillips’ 2019 Joker seemingly hit the box office at just the right time, weaving between the late Trump years and the breakout of the global pandemic and cashing in on post-Avengers: Endgame MCU exhaustion. This time around, nothing seems to be going Joker: Folie à Deux’s way. Also, based on early reviews at least, it just sounds like a terrible movie.
Joaquin Phoenix reprises his role as the downtrodden and off-kilter Arthur Fleck, whose Joker persona takes him from lonely recluse to courtroom spectacle. This time around, Lady Gaga is by his side as Lee Quinzel aka Harley Quinn, her voice propelling the sequel’s musical jukebox premise to weird and, apparently, uneven ends. The movie hits theaters today and so far critics are slamming the high-concept comic book fodder with a 39 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. That puts it above Catwoman but below Batman Forever.
Jake Coyle for the AP calls it a “theoretically interesting film but a curiously dull one.” David Fear’s review at Rolling Stone is titled, “‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Has a Message for Fans: Go F-ck Yourselves.” Nick Shager’s review at The Daily Beast, meanwhile, leads with calling the sequel “So Bad and So Boring It’s Absolutely Shocking.” Johnny Oleksinski’s review for the New York Post bemoans that “Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix sing for no reason in pointless sequel.” The consensus seems to be that the movie makes some bold choices but never commits enough for them to land.
Despite being a sequel, it’s mostly focused on rehashing the events of the first film and Fleck’s ultimate culpability in them, all while playing around with a clumsy setup that goes nowhere. Here’s a particularly brutal paragraph from Germain Lussier io9 review:
All the while, Joker: Folie à Deux keeps teasing its audience in unsatisfying ways. Will Arthur and Lee’s musical fantasies amount to anything? They don’t. Does Lee’s fandom for Joker say anything in particular about the nature of celebrity? Not really. Scenes we want to be longer are not. Scenes we want to be short are long. And each time the film sets up a question to be answered and either doesn’t or completely flips it on its head, it gets increasingly maddening. This may have been the point but it doesn’t quite work.
Matt Singer at Screencrush notes that Gaga gets surprisingly little time for big musical set pieces, with her limited screen time reserved more for proactive flirtations with Fleck. Justin Clark at Slant Magazine dings the movie for “cinematic centrism.” “On the one hand, it’s obsessed with the non-controversy that making Arthur too relatable might create a real-life incel killer,” he writes. “On the other, it plays out as if making either Joker or Lee too funny, or their musical sequences too lavish, might make it too close to the comics and cartoons that Phillips has no real fealty toward.”
And the hits just keep coming. “’Joker: Folie à Deux’ is such a dour, unpleasant slog that it is hard to know why it was made or for whom,” begins Manohla Dargis at The New York Times. More diplomatically, Liz Shannon Miller at Consequence writes, “There are pieces of this movie which do prove to be genuinely engaging, but they’re largely driven by the passionate commitment of the core cast. Phoenix and his H.R. Giger-inspired shoulder blades are back, and this time… he tap dances! Much like this movie dances around its points.”
I’ll leave you with this thoughtful summation of the Joker 2’s promise and failure from David Ehrlich at Indie Wire:
Needless to say, ‘Folie à Deux’ does not give the people what they want. On the contrary, it actively courts the disappointment of its own fandom in order to articulate how cruelly Arthur is co-opted by the fantasies of the collective unconscious — lost in a dream that his followers want to have for themselves. That’s all well and good for a meta-sequel that isn’t afraid to alienate its target audience, the problem is that Phillips doesn’t give the people anything else instead. His film is bold enough to deny expectations (and smug enough to savor the growing dissatisfaction that it creates in return), but not remotely thoughtful enough to offer something more interesting in their place.
At least no one has to schlep themselves to the theater to hear Gaga’s music for it. And the movie itself will no doubt hit streaming by the holidays.
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