REVIEW: Joker: Folie à Deux
Joker: Folie à Deux is the sequel to the incredibly successful Joker movie by Hangover creator Todd Phillips. It is also notable for being a massive bomb that has angered quite a few fans with its unconventional take. It is has Joaquin Phoenix return to the role of the titular Joker, and he is joined by co-star Lady Gaga as a version of Harley Quinn, a character with her own massive fanbase.
Like the original Joker film, this film takes place in a Gotham City that doesn’t have a Batman and is a heightened version of America’s already troubled legal as well as social system. Defenders of the movie say it is about mental illness rather than the Joker himself. Detractors state it’s advertised as a Joker movie and should be a Joker movie. As a longtime Batman fan, enjoyer of grimdark, and neuroatypical person myself, what do I think? Does this movie deserve the hate it gets?
Yeah, it kinda does.
The premise of Joker: Folie A Deux is that Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has been arrested for his murders from the previous movie and spends most of the film incarcerated at Arkham Asylum. While there, he meets a beautiful woman named Lee (Lady Gaga), who has fallen in love with his Joker persona but not Arthur Fleck. The film is all about Arthur’s relationship with his persona and the treatment of the mentally ill by society. There’s also a lot of singing and no original songs.
Essentially, I feel the movie is very much at odds with what the audience would expect from not just the title and the Joker as a character, but where the previous movie was leading. The previous Joker movie depicted the transformation of Arthur Fleck from being a mild-mannered decent-enough sort into a murderer for attention. It was making the questionable but not incomprehensible postulation that society pushes a person long enough, he’ll start pushing back in a violent horrifying manner.
It’s the premise of Taxi Driver and was also influenced strongly by The King of Comedy, both by Martin Scorsese. Fans justifiably expected that we’d see the Joker continue his crime spree and illustrate how society glorifies killers. It’s easy to see why Joker: Folie à Deux went over like a lead balloon among fans because they went to see Bonnie and Clyde or Natural Born Killers and instead got Chicago. A really bad, off-key, version of Chicago.
I can understand if Todd Phillips didn’t want to pursue this line of writing or felt the previous movie’s fans missed the mark but the fact is that Arthur in Joker: Folie à Deux doesn’t feel like he flows from the previous film. After becoming a multiple murderer and surrendering to his inner demons, this Arthur feels like a rubber band that snapped back to his previous goofy self. It doesn’t feel natural and it’s badly written.
Lee is barely a character in Joker: Folie à Deux and if feels like she is just there to represent the idea that Arthur has fans who do not care about him in the slightest, only the Joker. Except the reason that he became the Joker in the first place is because he wanted people to worship him. It’s a waste of Lady Gaga’s talents and the fact the soundtrack sucks is the most inexplicable part of this film. Given Lady Gaga made her own original soundtrack for this film and they didn’t use it, well, I think that summarizes what a car crash this all turned out to be.
As someone with mental health issues, I feel Todd just doesn’t understand us and doesn’t understand the appeal of the Joker either. We don’t need his defense. The first movie understood that he wasn’t a killer because he was “insane.” It was society and corruption that drove him to become a spree killer. It was society who misinterpreted what was a cry for help into something revolutionary. Joker: Folie à Deux just seems to say that none of that matters and Arthur should have just accepted being crushed like a bug. It even seems to endorse prisoner abuse.
Two thumbs down.
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