Todd Phillips’ 2016 hit Joker was a beautiful but ultimately vapid meditation on the cruelty of the mental health system. It masqueraded as an origin story to the Batman supervillain but was quickly and publicly co-opted by men who admired the film’s murderous protagonist, Arthur Fleck, for his live-on-TV murder of a talk show host who mocked him.
The sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, attempts (unsuccessfully) to undermine the admiration audiences had for Fleck (or Joker, as his alter ego is called) in a series of in-your-face events: openly pathetic and delusional men in masks vie for Fleck’s attention, attempt to help him get away with his crimes, and hold up posters demanding his freedom from prison.
Insultingly, Harley Quinn (called “Lee” by Fleck, because this is a grounded film and not some comic book garbage, as Phillips seems to sneer at viewers through his adaptational decisions) is one of those rabid admirers. Despite being a victim of the Joker’s abuse for decades in the comics, Joker’s Harley is the abuser – she manipulates Fleck, lies to him about her origins to get closer to him, lies to him about a pregnancy to keep him close to her, and is delusionally obsessed with him. After he tells the world that he isn’t really Joker, Harley is the first to walk away from him, leading a tide of disillusioned followers. For a movie that spent hours pretentiously declaring its disgust at reactions to the first film, its main female protagonist is an insulting misogynist caricature of a girl obsessed with a famous killer.
The musical aspect of the film, one of the most controversial reveals about its plot prior to release, was also lacking. Neither Joaquin Phoenix nor Lady Gaga’s vocal performances were particularly impressive, and the use of song as a metaphor for their joint delusion was overdone and exhausting by the end. It refused to fully commit to a musical, instead using its status as one as a marketing ploy.
Perhaps the most confusing part of the film was its use of sexual assault as a plot device. Despite being marketed as a courtroom drama, only around half of the movie took place in a courtroom, where Fleck was attempting to secure an insanity plea on the grounds that “Joker” was a separate personality to his own. On the day before closing statements, Fleck is sexually assaulted by several corrections officers. The next day, he comes into the courtroom visibly shaken and declares that he was never “Joker”, asking for a guilty charge. It is a bizarre choice that seemed to serve no purpose other than being shocking, and only continued to reinforce the idea that more of this movie was designed to drum up publicity than tell a complete story.
While the film was visually decent (its use of color in particular was almost as enjoyable as the first Joker movie), its lack of commitment to any one message made it nearly impossible to finish watching. It served as a meta response refuting the idolization of its protagonist while simultaneously deriding all women who showed up on camera and wallowing in Fleck’s misery with him, was a musical that seemed embarrassed to be a musical, and (much like the first) was a film that had no interest in originality or detail. To say this movie was a disappointment would be an understatement.
1/5 Stars
(Note: This article was originally published on December 2, 2024.)
