Joker Folie a Deux….or should I say Joker Folie a Dud.
The long awaited sequel to Todd Phillip’s Joker is out and it does not live up to the hype of the original. I’m convinced Todd Phillips created this film so that he WOULDN’T have to do any more of them and could move on with his life.
I tweeted out when the first teaser came out that it looked like A Star is Born and La La Land did meth and ended up dead in an alley somewhere, and I think that’s a pretty accurate description of what we just saw.
It's like A Star is Born had a final dream sequence like La La Land but instead of thriving, the main characters did a bunch of meth and ended up dead in an alley somewhere two hours later. https://t.co/KhxWKWGVEW
— Jon Lunceford (@jlunce) April 10, 2024
Joaquin Phoenix, coming off his Oscar win for portraying Arthur Fleck in the first film, has not been having a great time in Hollywood lately. And his triumphant return as Joker…didn’t help any.
He’s joined by Lady Gaga who is portraying Harley Quinn, or as she goes by the entire movie, just “Lee”, and doesn’t quite bring the same energy we’ve known from Harley Quinn in animated form and from Margot Robbie.
I get it, this world is different than all the other “Batman” versions of Joker. We see Bruce Wayne as a kid in the first one, and he has just…disappeared in this one. Also, speaking of Batman, as far as I know…hasn’t Gotham typically been located in New Jersey? They stray from mentioning Gotham specifically and since it’s a court room drama, the only “location” you hear throughout the film is New York since it’s The People of New York vs. Arthur Fleck.
Obviously Arkham is in it since that’s where Arthur is, but even though this is it’s own story – these are still characters we all know and love, but it just…didn’t work.
And of course the elephant in the room is the musical numbers, which are totally out of left field and not needed at all. It wasn’t promoted at first as a musical, then the promotions started to bring in a little more of that. But it just doesn’t work. I just can’t imagine anyone read this script and heard these ideas and thought “yes, let’s do that!” They had to just be blinded by the Billion dollars that the first one made and just signed all the paperwork without even reading.
Overall, I like Todd Phillips. Old School is great, obviously The Hangover movies did well (and I even like the whole trilogy), plus Road Trip, Due Date and War Dogs – all solid flicks. I just…don’t know where it went wrong in his head.
I didn’t necessarily hate the performances. Joaquin Phoenix was good, just not near as good as he was before. Brendan Gleeson played a dirty, abusive guard at Arkham decently well, Steve Coogan essentially takes the place of Robert De Niro as a TV personality who interviews Arthur – but the best performance of the film was actually Leigh Gill as Arthur’s former co-worker Gary Puddles. You’ll know him from what is the most shocking scene to me in the first film where Arthur stabs his co-worker Randall, played by Glenn Fleshler, but let’s Gary go.
Another slight positive was the cinematography from Lawrence Sher who is a frequent collaborator of Todd Phillips. But that’s about where the positives stop.
There are so any questions I have about this movie that I want to get into, but I won’t get into spoiler territory here. But it just doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s like a fan-fiction epilogue from a Batman forum where someone said “hey, what if it was a musical all in Arthur’s head?” I didn’t hate the idea when I first heard it, I just don’t think it was executed well.
If you very much loved the first one, go see this to make your own opinion, but this will not be one I look back fondly on. Everything that made the first film really good was missing from this. I now kinda wish Todd Phillips would have pulled a Hangover 2 and basically do the same story over again, just with slight differences to make it it’s own thing.
When it comes to award season, I don’t know how much love this will get. I think before it’s release and negative reaction, people kind of assumed it would be there since Joaquin and Lady Gaga have won Oscars in recent history and Joker 1 was nominated for 11 Academy Awards winning two for best score and best actor. But now, I just don’t know. With so many great movies still set to hit theaters in the next few months to round out the year and already a handful of films poised to make some noise, I just can’t see this getting much of anything as it’s been removed from most industry short lists.
So that’s my Joker 2 review, I can’t keep saying Folie a Deux much longer. What did you think? Let me know on Twitter @jlunce and I’m already looking forward to what I’ll get to watch next to erase this from my memory.
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