Joker II Should be Subtitled Folly for Two

 

 

 

Joker: Folie á Deux

Directed by Todd Phillips

Warner Brothers, 138 minutes, R (violence, nudity)

★★

 

Joker (2019) made a billion dollars, garnered 11 Academy Award nominations, and won two: Best Original Score and Best Acting (Joaquin Phoenix). Joker: Folie á Deux (2024) is why many moviegoers hate sequels. It had the same director, Todd Phillips, Joaquin Phoenix returned as Arthur Fleck, many of the secondary actors reupped, and megastar Lady Gaga joined the cast. It cost four times as much to make as the first movie but earned 1/4 of what the first film raked in at the box office. Counting promos for overseas markets, it lost about $150 million. There were no Academy Award nominations, but 7 Golden Raspberries including Worst Remake and Worst Screen Combo (Phoenix and Gaga).

 

Was it bad? Yes, it was. It's again a thriller, but also a musical–if one has an expansive definition of that term that doesn't include staying on key or paying attention to melody. Whose bright idea was it to sign Lady Gaga, a seriously talented vocalist, and direct her to sing badly?

 

The thin plot picks up where the first movie left off. Party clown Arthur Fleck (Phoenix ) is in jail/mental hospital for five murders and that's not counting killing his own mother, which no one knows about. The scenes inside Arkham are depressing, bleak, and chilling. (Arkham is a now-empty isolation hospital in Bellevue, New Jersey.) Each day is like the previous. Prisoners are roused from their sleep and line up to dump their slop buckets, before being sent to a day room where  Arthur, the would-be clown, is badgered into  telling a joke. Dozens of seriously demented prisoners watch TV as guards look on, both to keep the peace and to seize opportunities to practice sadistic discipline. Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) is the worst of the lot, though he feigns sympathy for Arthur. Outside the walls, street anarchists and attention-starved young people chant Joker’s praises.

 

Some of this might have been powerful had not Phillips and co-script writer Scott Silver turn the film into demented musical theatre devoid of logic. For some reason, there are also women in the institution, including self-committed Harley “Lee” Quinzel (Gaga). Well-behaved men can sit in group therapy sessions with the women. Hmm… what could go wrong? Lee sees Arthur as a hero to her outward rebel, poor girl persona. Before you know it, Lee is sneaking into Arthur’s cell where they pledge their love and bodies to each other.

 

How? Beats me. They also sing tuneless songs to each other. Is real or a fantasy?  Show tunes without the show? The central theme is “That's Entertainment.” If only it were. But nothing is quite as strange as the attempt of Arthur's attorney Marianne Stewart (Catherine Keener) to win a new trial for Arthur based on the grounds that he can’t be guilty of murder because he was insane at the time but is now recovering. Huh? Contrary to what most believe, the standard isn’t sanity perse; it’s whether a defendant knows the difference between right and wrong. Oh, Arthur knows! His in-house interview with a TV journalist doesn't go well and neither does his trial.

 

To put it indelicately, this movie stinks. Stop here if you’ve never seen it but still want to. Read on if you're convinced I'm saving you from the pain of doing so. Here come the spoilers!

 

Arthur does exactly what his character would do; he sabotages his trial. He would rightly be locked up for life, except a firebomb blows up the courthouse, and kills numerous people. Arthur stumbles out of the rubble to search for Lee. When he finds Lee and says she's the only one who has ever seen him as he really is, she’s no longer interested. She wants Joker, not pathetic Arthur Fleck. He is recaptured, sent back to Arkham, and is ostracized by guards and prisoners alike. Another psychotic stabs Arthur, who bleeds out.

 

Near the end Lady Gaga sings with power and authority. What a waste! The best that can be said of this misguided project is that the Looney Tunes-like “Me and My Shadow” at the movie’s beginning is beguiling. What was the point of the rest? A lampoon of woke lefty culture? How the young can be led by their nose rings? I hope not. Otherwise this film can add backdoor Trumpism to its list of sins.

 

If Joker Two really hemorrhaged $150 million, it deserved to lose every penny.

 

Rob Weir