Review - Joker: Folie à Deux

Image: Warner Bros. via Collider (2024)

There’s something kinda fun and exciting about watching a movie made purely out of spite and dripping with contempt for the audience, but for all the weird choices and all of the things it’s got going for it, the real crime of Joker 2 is that it’s boring.


Real quick: amazing-looking movie. Cinematography, color, production design, lighting…incredible. There’s a lot of really cool shots that feel very comic-adjacent. Phoenix is still great, and Gaga masters a dead-eyed stare that really suggests absolute derangement.
 The movie has a lot of issues, however, and makes issues from the first one more apparent, as I realized how basic as a character Arthur really is. And I get that that’s the point to an extent, as the first film is more about social isolation and dehumanization with a sad, angry, pathetic guy at its center, but this second movie is a study, and you can’t really make a compelling study about a guy with just 2 or 3 traits to him.


Thematically, the movie is overly dependent on a single point: that Arthur Fleck is actually dumb and pathetic and his followers are even dumber and more pathetic. You get it from the start, and even the previous movie, and there’s really nothing else the movie is trying to say. This repetition, plus the film’s reluctance to embrace its comic book origins, the monotonous similarity of the musical numbers, and the fact that the courtroom and prison movies it’s trying to be are both lackluster and derivative, make the movie hollow.


And yet, it’s miles more original than a lot of the more corporate-feeling CBMs. It’s not necessarily better, but it’s certainly different and distinctive. Doing the total opposite of an IP-driven story isn’t necessarily an improvement over the IP-driven stories. It might sound dumb, but man, I really wish this was good. And again, there’s something fun in watching professional hater™️ Todd Phillips have a kinda childish tantrum about his own movie and its audience. Like, you’re the guy that made a billion-dollar movie that won Venice and at the Oscars. You did great, but you also did this to yourself. Relax.

Joker: Folie à Deux is a great-looking and well acted but repetitive, boring, and hollow film trying to coast by on owning the fans of its protagonist and the aesthetic choices it makes, but it’s not nearly enough to create something compelling. So much potential, too. 😐