Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
Sequel to 2019's Joker by Todd Phillips. Joker 2 deals with the aftermath of Joker which, of course, ended with mentally unstable Arthur Fleck taking on the identity of The Joker, commiting murder on live television and getting arrested. The sequel finds him in prison, awaiting trial, conflicted between embracing or rejecting the Joker identity.
It's different. I don't think it's very good but it's different. I only ever found the 2019 movie okay and if I'm being honest what stuck with me most was the incredibly skeevy viral marketing campaign that played off the earlier Dark Knight Rises mass shooting in Colorado to frame it as this dangerous, radical work that might inspire real world violence. Which, of course, stood in stark contrast to its rather tame content. What I wrote back then was that Joker felt like it's all setup, no punchline. A well directed but pretty anticlimactic origin story for what has got to be the most boring interpretation of the Joker, something that took little advantage of the preexisting setting and iconography of the Batman series and sometimes felt actively dismissive of it.
Joker 2 tries even harder to be its own weird thing, continuing to keep any connection to the Batman series at arms length and delving even deeper into unreliable narration to produce this incredibly cynical psychological drama full of postironic and metafictional quirks that should be a lot more compelling than I actually found it.
Joker 2 introduces a version of Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, as a fellow mental patient. Oh, did I mention? Joker 2 is a musical. She becomes a sort of devil on his shoulder, pushing him deeper into the Joker persona against his better judgement and against the advice of his lawyer hoping to save him from a death sentence. As the trial approaches and he keeps suffering abuses in prison while a cult of personality builds up around him on the outside, the line between Arthur Fleck and the Joker blurs, as does the line between objective and subjective. The movie really goes all in on the whole unreliable narrator thing, to the point that even by the end I'm not 100% sure if Lady Gaga was even real or not.
And, I dunno, recounting it like that I feel like I should have liked this more than I did but I really couldn't bring myself to. Yes, there are aspects of this I enjoyed and I would have liked to see explored in something better. In theory I did like the reversal of Harley Quinn being the one manipulating and gaslighting the Joker to push him over the edge, rather than the other way around. I liked the whole angle with the heavily publicized, sensationalized trial that seems to be mostly satirizing the Charles Manson trials. I liked the ambiguity of what's real and what's imagined. I don't necessarily like these aspects in combination with each other but I think individually they're valid ideas.
I very much didn't care for the weird self referential elements that feel like they're the product of an alternate universe where Joker actually was the radical, controversial blockbuster its media buzz tried to make people think it is. What Phillips probably wants us to think he's doing is deconstructing his own masterpiece and putting a mirror in front of the ignorant masses that had either disliked it or liked it for the wrong reasons. But what it really feels like is a passive aggressive humble brag. "Oh, now it's time for me to be self critical about the consequences of making the WIDELY BELOVED MASS PHENOMENON Joker (2019)! I have to take responsibility for how INSPIRING the ICONIC CHARACTER I created was to so many people! Confront the MASSIVE CULTURAL IMPACT of my work!" and it's like, dude, you're the director of The Hangover and you made a mid budget Batman spin-off, get over it.
I dunno, maybe I'm reading too much into it but something about the movie just felt self congratulatory, like a two-and-a-quarter hour victory lap trying to pass itself off as a deconstruction. Yes, you're putting Joker on trial, I get it, it's not that clever. From a technical standpoint it's still rather nice, I do think Phillips is a skilled visual director and it captures that moody, gritty 70's feel once again really well. Joaquin Phoenix once again shows what he earned that Oscar for and Lady Gaga is honestly great, if anything a bit underutilized, in her role. There's nothing wrong with the presentation of the movie but you know, no matter how much work you put in, it's still a smug addendum to an already kind of middling movie that, I feel, in the long term will mostly be remembered as "that weird pretentious sequel where the Joker gets raped in prison".
Or maybe not, maybe this will find a cult audience eventually, it seems vaguely like the sort of thing that would. But as someone who didn't care all that much for the first Joker, I didn't think this was any good and I have my doubts that the people who did like the first Joker will really be all that into it either. A dark fatalistic psychological thriller Batman spin-off sounds a lot better than this actually manages to be. Honestly, I watched the Matt Reeves Batman movie from 2022 again recently and god, does it hold up a lot better than the first Joker, much less whatever this is. I'm all for weird people trying weird shit with established properties but sometimes you just have to write off an experiment, bold as it is, as a failure.
