Review: Joker: Folie à Deux

Though it offers gorgeous moody visuals and well-choreographed musical numbers, Joker 2 loses much of the tension of the first film and offers nothing new in return. A boring slog that is an insult to the DC characters which it so terribly reduces to empty canvases.

Joker 2 picks up two years after the first film. With Arthur Fleck locked up in Arkham, he’s now facing a courtroom trail after being partially rehabilitated. His lawyer wants to argue that a split personality disorder caused him to commit the murders. The remainder of the film sees Arthur try to prove his innocence during the publicly televised trial.

From this instant, it becomes clear that Joker 2 has no new ideas to offer. It’s the Seinfeld-finale equivalent of comic book movie sequels. Instead of taking the character to a new place, it chooses to rehash the events of the first film by having Arthur stand trial for his previous actions. This theoretically presents the opportunity for an interesting psychoanalysis of Arthur Fleck, but instead turns into a boring slog of non-events.

To be fair, I’m someone who did not enjoy the first Joker movie. I thought it played out political tropes in a derivative manner, while discarding any of its comic book flare. Yet, as much as I lament the first Joker movie for having an active disdain for its comic book origins, the film was at least engaging. That movie built tension in a way where, even if you didn’t like the story, you couldn’t look away. For all of its pseudo intellectualism, Joker was still intense, shocking and emotionally raw.

Joker 2 in comparison offers none of that. Instead, it takes the worst elements of the first movie, and grinds those down only to present them in a more meaningless fashion. The musical elements of the film are the strongest. They actually offer something fresh and unique. Yet they are merely a reprieve from an otherwise empty film.

That’s where Lady Gaga’s character ‘Lee’ comes in. Her version of Harley Quinn is starkly different to any previous interpretation. A fellow inmate at Arkham, she initially tricks Arthur into sympathising with her before revealing more. She does this presumably to manipulate him. But that’s just it—she doesn’t do much at all.

In what would have been an interesting twist to the usual Joker-Harley relationship (where Joker turns Harley insane), she could have bolstered Arthur’s craziness. Instead, her screentime mostly consists of her whining to the press about Arthur’s trial and vaguely encouraging him to fire his lawyer and represent himself. Despite her offering a layer of romantic complexity for Arthur, her character is one-dimensional, and ultimately has zero emotional or practical impact on the story. It is genuinely shocking how little she has to say, or do, in a movie whose marketing campaign bills her as a co-lead.

The dream sequences that Lee shares with Arthur make up the majority of the musical numbers. And while these are wonderfully choreographed, and beautifully performed by Gaga especially, they amount to nothing more than brief interruptions to a mind-numbingly directionless film.

One of the dance sequences serves as vague foreshadowing, but most of them are totally incongruous with the plot and feel like a glimpse into what could have been a much better movie that we never got to see.

To the filmmakers’ credit, it seems like a creatively-probing concept was had here, to put the Joker in a musical. The musical numbers are easily the best part of the movie, I just wish there was more.

Perhaps most tragically, Lady Gaga’s talent is totally wasted on this film. Gaga shows excellent potential to shine, but is never given the chance. Her singing is brilliant, but the dance sequences are short, and never let her character truly fill the screen.

Worse than that, the movie sidelines the musical elements to instead focus on more dull scenes of Arthur roaming around prison or at his court trial. It’s obvious now why they didn’t call the movie a musical. The musical sequences are few and far between, and feel rushed. The result is a painfully boring film that misses the point, if it ever had one.

The film does attempt to draw a thematic throughline. Arthur ends the first Joker movie feeling seen for the first time in his life after being ignored. This movie throws him into a prison where he is treated just as poorly by the system as he was before. His trial offers him the chance to reckon with whether the Joker is his true identity, or if he’s simply a sad man hiding behind an act.

The philosophical discussion about mental illness here could have been an interesting one. Though it seems the film’s writers were not interested in discussing it at all. We get flashes of dialogue from Arthur’s interviews with lawyers and news reporters that are almost intellectually interesting, but they never reach a real discussion.

The movie feels confused, like it’s just chugging through the motions to make a sequel that no one seems sure why it exists. In the end, there is no philosophical discussion to be had, nor is there any compelling moment to draw the audience in. Arthur is just the same sad character, but stripped of any of the emotional intensity or attitude that made him compelling in the first film.

Defenders may argue that this film paints a more accurate portrait of mental illness, but the film doesn’t do a particularly good job of that either. If the dull and haunting tone of movies like Bergman’s ‘Persona’ showed us the torture of mental illness, Joker 2 only shows the torture of sitting through 2 hours of nonsense. For what it’s worth, I think the ending is one of the strongest parts. It makes sense thematically, and reframes the first movie in an clever light. But that alone can’t save it.

Amid the mess of the story, the film does offer some pretty visuals. Many moody backlit scenes have impressively crafted sets that feel like a cross between a Looney Tunes cartoon and a Twin Peaks dream sequence. Cinematographer Lawrence Sher knows how to light and frame a scene to make these characters pop. And in the few scenes where Joker and Lee are in full costume, they look excellent. The rooftop dance sequence is a particular highlight.

The movie also offers an expanded IMAX aspect ratio during key scenes. I’m a big fan of real IMAX movies—that is, movies presented in the full 1.43 ratio which is shaped like a square. Very few films have ever been filmed in this ratio. Many Christopher Nolan films have achieved this by using real 70mm IMAX cameras to capture the huge frame. More recently, filmmakers like Denis Villeneuve have used digital IMAX-certified cameras to capture the same 1.43 ratio. Phillips used the same digital cameras for Joker 2, and yet the impact feels lost.

Joker 2 constantly switches between a regular 2.35:1 aspect ratio, an expanded 1.90, and the full 1.43 for key scenes. And while the odd shot of Gotham City looks sprawling and impressive in 1.43, I couldn’t help but feel that this it lost its impact.

Phillips seemed to employ the expanded ratio on a whim, often on close-ups of characters, or the musical scenes, but it didn’t feel grandiose. It just felt like a slightly bigger image with extra space. The images in this movie weren’t particularly suited to the boxier ratio that 1.43 offers, and it didn’t feel as striking as it did when filmmakers like Nolan, Zack Snyder, or even Brad Bird had used it. Those directors understood that it should be used for behemoth visual impact. Here, it feels indulgent and mostly wasted.

If anything, I feel that Joker 2 represents a peek into the potentially worrying future of movies based on comic book characters. When these characters become available in the public domain (which is quite soon), any filmmaker will be able to use them. That opens the door to wonderful reinterpretations of beloved characters. But it may also lead to more situations like Joker 2.

Joker 2 represents a situation where a studio capitalises on the brand-name of a famous character, to make a movie that bears zero resemblance to that character’s origins other than his name and basic appearance. The first Joker movie at least attempted to sprinkle in some DC Comics lore, even if it flipped it on its head and totally disregarded all of the rules and stylistic elements.

If it wasn’t already clear, Todd Phillips is not only disinterested in the DC characters but appears to want to actively insult anyone who has ever been a fan of these characters. To be clear, this isn’t about a lack of fanservice—I think filmmakers should offer uniquely distinct visions for these characters unperturbed by the expectations of fandom. But when they do that, there should at least be some motivation for taking an established character to a new and interesting place.

A new interpretation must have a compelling reason to exist. And if your movie has nothing to do with Joker, why even call it a Joker movie? This movie is simply about a depressed individual reckoning with his crimes. And it’s not even a good one at that. There were some probing themes to be considered here about mental illness, but the film never gets there. At least the first movie had the decency to emulate the stories of two Scorsese masterpieces. This film is just plain mindless.