JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX (2024)

I wasn’t sure what to expect going into Joker: Folie à Deux. I was also dubious about Todd Phillips’ first instalment, Joker (2019), the canon-defying tale of a mentally unstable loner, forgotten in a metropolis that’s unsympathetic to his plight. However, having been impressed by that entry, I reasoned that Phillips was a director who knew what he was doing and that this gratuitous sequel would at least be in safe hands. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The sequel takes place in Gotham City, two years after Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) committed five grisly murders. After encountering a young woman named Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga) at Arkham State Hospital, the pair immediately develop a strong connection. As Arthur is set to stand trial for his crimes, he begins disappearing into his fantasy world once again, hoping to unveil the dreaded visage of the Joker for all to see.

The first entry into the newly-minted ‘DC Elseworlds’ project isn’t only superfluous, but also surprisingly dull. In Phoenix’s first outing as our eponymous antihero/pitiable villain, the film had a terrific dramatic arc and an engaging plot, all while serving as a frightening character study. As Phillips returns to the director’s chair for the first time since his ground-breaking debut in the DC Universe (DCU), it’s painfully apparent that he and co-screenwriter Scott Silver have nowhere to go.

In a world as chaotic and zany as Gotham City, it feels surprising that Silver and Phillips couldn’t have designed a more enthralling narrative. Five years ago, our first look at Arthur showed him living a terrifying urban nightmare. There was a superlative sense of momentum, an electric pace as we watched a man spiral into an increasingly violent insanity. Now, we watch as a man… sits in a jail cell for two hours.

How on Earth could they not have thought of a more gripping tale for DC’s most infamous villain? What I don’t understand is how such a foray into the super-heroically tedious was approved. Did test audiences agree that placing the Joker in a courtroom drama was the way forward for this character? I know for certain that the people in my screening were just as displeased with this story choice as I was: some patrons left before the unnecessarily long story had concluded, grumbling on their way out the door.

If nothing else, moving from a film as electrifying as Joker to a work that induces such apathy in the audience speaks to the sheer drop in quality between the two pieces. However, even if we weren’t to compare the two movies, Joker: Folie à Deux is disappointing in its own right. There’s no narrative direction, no real sense of drama or stakes, and the painful dearth of momentum leaves the film without a rhythm. It just limps through, not keeping in step with the music.

Most of the issues are probably to be found at the screenplay level. Though there’s no end to how a good project can be botched, that doesn’t appear to be the problem here: the greatest obstacle to this movie’s success is the absence of any real story idea. Obviously, in the real world, Arthur Fleck would stand trial for his crimes. But why revel in the mundane and prosaic? Surely there was a more riveting story to be unearthed after the events of the first movie?

Apparently not. Or at least, not according to Phillips and Silver—this was as interesting as the story could have been in their eyes. Outside the sinfully humdrum narrative structure, some of the dialogue itself feels ludicrous. Principal among these includes Harleen’s vehement assertion: “We’re going to build a mountain.” Right… but what does this repeated mantra mean? I understand it’s evocative and imparts a grandiose sense of anarchic upheaval.

However, Harleen never actually describes any plan of any kind. She promises Arthur and the media that she’ll have him released from prison and that they’ll walk free together, but we never see her do anything besides don make-up, sing, and generally exhibit other emo-esque behaviour. As a result, her character feels deeply uninteresting, and her rhetoric sounds like that of a hormone-riddled teenager: spoken with a lot of feeling, but without a great deal of thought.

As a result, many of the scenes with the two characters feel vacuous. Harleen tries to provoke (and promote) angst and outrage in Arthur, his janissaries, and the audience, but it all feels as though Phillips and Silver are trying very hard to disguise the fact that they’re not saying anything of substance at all. Because the aims and objectives of our primary characters remain so diffuse, we have no clue as to what their aspirations are, nor how they will try and achieve them. Subsequently, we stop caring entirely, and the 138-minute runtime feels uncommonly long.

The ideas which were explored far more subtly in the original film (though, even then, Phillips and Silver made their thematic concerns quite obvious) are immediately laid bare in an opening segment. In a fake cartoon fashioned after the Warner Bros. classic Looney Tunes animated series, we watch as Arthur Fleck prepares backstage, donning his clown make-up and signature suit. However, his shadow begins fighting him. Locking up Arthur in his wardrobe, his shadow cakes itself in make-up, dresses, then absconds to commit crimes.

I enjoyed this prologue. Besides being visually interesting, it dramatizes Arthur’s mental illness in a darkly playful manner. As an allegory for the Jungian shadow-self, we watch as the repressed aggression that Arthur has buried for so long finally erupts; he is now pure id. Taking pleasure in violence, he is narcissistic and cruel, celebrating his own malice and deviant intelligence. Much like the subtext that drives Stanley Kubrick’s probing exploration of our hidden psyches in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), dark desires are seen to land our protagonists in trouble, but are equally recognised as an inextricable aspect of our personas.

It’s a shame that after this intriguing opening segment, the film’s message loses focus. Much like the dual personality our unfortunate main character is said to experience, the film suffers from conflicting viewpoints: are we supposed to sympathise with Arthur after society has turned him into this tragic figure? Or is it that he’s empowered by his crazed nihilism, and we should deify him as being this tortured Zarathustra?

I’m not sure how Silver and Phillips view this character. The message in the first film at least felt concise and consistent—here, I can’t tell what they’re saying, causing me to wonder if they’re commenting on anything at all. With such opaque messaging, I’d lean towards the latter. I’m also unsure as to why Phillips appears so keen on fetishizing misery; several characters and shots in the film appear to be extolling the virtues of nihilistic criminality, venerating the dysfunction on display. Not to suggest that Phillips or Silver thereby condone it, but it doesn’t strike me as entirely balanced in its depiction of law-keeping bureaucracy and the wanton anarchy of the marginalised.

Another thing that confuses me is the decision to turn this into a musical. Who watched the first film and said: “That was a stunning excavation of how urban apathy and corporate greed is akin to a societal mental illness, one that culminates in severe social issues that can give rise to multifarious psychological disturbances. But do you know what that dark, disturbing drama really needed? A musical number!”

I couldn’t say how much of the runtime is given over to these musical numbers, which somehow manage to be simultaneously glamorous and dingy, garishly resplendent and wholly lustreless, but I can state with certainty that it’s too much. Worse, it damages the potential for genuine characterisation (particularly of Harley Quinn) and prevents authentic drama from building between our two misfit leads.

At times, the characters just need to have a serious conversation. Yet, instead of revealing something important, Quinn just bursts into a mournful song. Even Arthur has had enough by the end: “Please… stop singing…” It’s the same request I’d been muttering in the nearly empty cinema for the last 70 minutes. For my money, these set pieces are just far too long, making an already sluggish film feel interminable.

Occasionally, one suspects this incessant—and painfully excessive—dedication to dance routines was done to cater to Lady Gaga’s presence in the film. If it weren’t for the pop icon’s household name on the film’s poster, I can imagine more people would feel rather confused as to why there are so many musical numbers. At times, it feels like Gaga is hijacking the narrative with her star power, and I can foresee a lot of audiences being frustrated by the unjustified amount of screen time she’s given.

There is, of course, another reason that Phillips turned to using musical numbers: it’s a stylish method used to convey Arthur’s dreamlike insanity, the hallucinogenic fantasies to which he escapes, and the psychedelic schizophrenia that plagues him. While I can appreciate this, some of these excerpts feel as though they are celebrating Arthur’s psychological dysfunction, which made me feel mildly uncomfortable. Whether you think Phillips is glamorising the anguish of mental illness (and whether that’s a very responsible thing to do) is up to you. I’m a bit ambivalent.

Throughout all of this, the one aspect of the film that remains utterly commendable is Joaquin Phoenix. He almost single-handedly justifies the film being made. After winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor in a Leading Role’ the last time he portrayed Arthur Fleck, one shouldn’t be surprised to find him nailing the role a second time. Just as he was five years prior, Phoenix is transfixing as a disturbed and embittered nihilist. As he strives to take vengeance upon the world itself, Phoenix is immensely compelling to watch, proving once again—as he recently did in Napoleon (2023)—that a bad film is almost worth watching when he’s in it.

I’d be remiss not to mention that the film is also beautiful to look at. As I was eventually going to see it, I’m glad I at least viewed it in the cinema. As frustratingly prolonged and tiresome as the musical numbers become, they all look stunning. The lighting is exceptionally done, providing a palpable atmosphere in a film woefully lacking in it. Having said this, as visually striking as the film is, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to see it just for that reason.

Because as pretty as it is, I was also begging for it to end. Perhaps it’s due to the excess of showy musical numbers which add nothing to the film—not drama, not pathos, not imagination—that it all feels massively overlong. Or maybe it’s the lack of characterisation, squandering the intriguing character study of the first film. Whatever it was, sensing that the story was moving confusedly in a multitude of directions (and getting nowhere as a result), I was itching for it to finish well before it did.

The truth is that, as much as audiences wanted a sequel (and Warner Bros. wanted to capitalise on that urge), making a follow-up to a film like Joker strikes me as incredibly difficult. Despite the fact it’s an unwarranted cash grab, how do you continue this story? Was the ending of the first film not the perfect place to leave it? It artfully demonstrated how an isolated figure, who was failed by society, had been placed into an institution for society’s undesirables, a place where he’d be forgotten about all over again. Rarely did a Greek tragedy enjoy a sequel, and for good reason.

This year’s sequels have been hit and miss for me, though Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) proved that some characters have more in them than what initially meets the eye. Additionally, A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) revealed how story worlds can continue to produce engagingly personal narratives, even after you think they may have become predictable.

Unfortunately, Joker: Folie à Deux is none of these things. The ending, much like the film itself, feels rather pointless and says very little, merely attempting to achieve some shock value. It fails even to do this, and the conclusion becomes a damp squib. Despite the technical competence and stellar central performance on display, the bloated runtime and weak script fail to turn this sequel into anything remotely interesting.

USA • CANADA | 2024 | 138 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Todd Phillips.
writers: Scott Silver & Todd Phillips (based on ‘DC Comics’ characters).
starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener & Zazie Beetz.