Joker, a Todd Phillips movie very, very loosely based mostly on a handful of pages from Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, broke the mould for contemporary comics-to-film diversifications by radically reinterpreting widespread characters and abandoning the superhero style altogether. It was an thrilling concept in idea, a check of the filmgoing viewers’s willingness to take an opportunity on one thing new as long as it’s dressed up as one thing acquainted. A really profitable check, certainly, incomes 11 Oscar nominations and $1 billion in worldwide field workplace. Nevertheless, Joker wasn’t something new—it was a clear and vastly inferior riff on Taxi Driver that, like its inspiration, disproportionately appealed to white male edgelords who over-identify with its antihero. It might be probably the most overhyped movie of the final 5 years, unworthy of a fraction of the acclaim and even the derision that it’s acquired.
JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX ★ (1/4 stars) |
Its new sequel, nonetheless, completely deserves the hate that’s coming to it. Joker: Folie à Deux is a product of untamed, aimless ambition, the type of mad swing that may be laudable if it weren’t so completely terrible. It falls flat as a musical, as a courtroom drama, as a romance, and as a personality piece. It’s the uncommon movie that’s each bizarre and boring, to a level that it’s laborious to think about anybody having fun with it.
Joaquin Phoenix reprises his Oscar-winning function as Arthur Fleck, a disturbed aspiring comic awaiting trial for the 5 murders he dedicated whereas sporting clown make-up within the earlier movie. Fleck, additionally identified by his stage title Joker, has change into a cult determine for the individuals of Gotham Metropolis, and his trial is a media circus aired on stay TV. Whereas many Gothamites wish to see District Legal professional Harvey Dent (Harry Lawley) ship Fleck to the electrical chair, lots of the disenfranchised lots see Joker as a robust image of . . . one thing. He’s a imprecise countercultural determine representing societal collapse, or perhaps our damaged well being care system, or probably our absurd class construction. It doesn’t matter. As in actual life, the Joker represents anarchy to individuals who don’t know what precise anarchists imagine.
Joker’s greatest fan is Lee (Woman Gaga), a fellow psychological affected person with whom he falls head over heels in love. The depth of their romance places a track of their hearts, and so they repeatedly get away of the movie’s bleak, dirty actuality into musical fantasy sequences patterned after ‘50s MGM classics or ‘70s selection exhibits. Or not less than, they do some of the time. About half of the songs in Folie à Deux are fully-fledged musical numbers during which Phoenix and Gaga ship appropriately stagey performances utilizing their full chest voices. The opposite half are diegetic, shot like drab, boring dialogue scenes and sung within the weak, reedy type that actors use after they’re attempting to fake they’re not skilled singers. The songs themselves are largely previous present tunes and requirements which were executed to demise, usually underscored by the scratchy ominous cellos that received composer Hildur Guǒnadóttir an Oscar final time round. Every track stops the film lifeless in its tracks. Not a single one is memorable.
It’s by no means clear to what extent we’re supposed to seek out Arthur and Lee’s romance disturbing, however no matter Phillips and firm’s intent, it’s lifeless on display. Each characters are rattling close to unattainable to root for, however in some way the pairing doesn’t even warrant a snide “they deserve one another.” It’s merely unattainable to care what occurs to both of them, individually or as a unit. Whereas Phoenix will possible garner popularity of his off-putting efficiency and dedication to sustaining his character’s skeletal body, it’s exceptional how little world-famous pop star Woman Gaga pops on this movie. Lee—a drastically totally different interpretation of comics antiheroine Harley Quinn—feels as if she could possibly be performed by anybody, significantly because the movie not often lets Gaga sing like we all know she will be able to.
To the movie’s credit score, Folie á Deux paints a way more fascinating and complicated portrait of its protagonist than the earlier chapter. The primary film portrays Arthur Fleck as an improbably unlucky unhappy sack who the complete world treats as a punchline or punching bag in a story so bleak and manipulative that you don’t have any selection however to pity him. Folie á Deux finds him incarcerated, but additionally extra accepted and revered than he’s ever been in his life. The story takes Arthur on a weird ego journey the place he should decide the place, if wherever, the road between himself and his Joker persona resides. Is he, the truth is, the image his troubled fanbase has come to worship? It’s a premise that may have been fascinating had been it not executed in such a slipshod, meandering method.
Folie á Deux’s central musical motif is “That’s Leisure,” launched when Arthur, Lee, and a crowd of different inmates are watching 1953’s The Band Wagon. On this scene, a dramatic actor (Jack Buchanan) tells his song-and-dance counterpart (Fred Astaire) that he’s “sick of those arbitrary boundaries between musical and drama.” “Excessive-brow” or “low-brow,” if one thing is entertaining, it’s leisure. This sentiment has been vindicated by the following 70 years of cross-pollination between theater, movie, tv, comics, and video video games. It’s, nonetheless, an inadequate protection for this movie. They may as effectively have known as it Joker: That’s Leisure and This Isn’t.