‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ is a musical and a bad one at that

I went into Joker: Folie à Deux with an open heart. After my hatred of Todd Phillips’ first Joker film from 2019, this one had all the makings of something I would actually enjoy. Lady Gaga, references to classic movie musicals, and beautiful shots of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker!

What I was gifted with instead was a mess of a movie that said nothing in its 2+ hour runtime and left me feeling hollow by the end. And not in that hollow way that art can sometimes create within you. A hollow feeling that means something changed you and made you feel emotions is sometimes what I want out of a film. The hollow feeling Joker: Folie à Deux gave me was coupled with dread over the future of cinema if this is what we’re investing money in.

At the start of Folie à Deux, Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is locked up in Arkham for the crimes he committed in the first movie. Charged with five murders, he is preparing to face trial for them. At first, I thought this storyline would be the start of Folie à Deux and we’d move on to anything else. Instead, I watched an entire movie of Fleck once again blaming society for making him this way. This time, with a badly written Harley Quinn in toe.

Gaga as “Lee” is a beautiful respite in this otherwise unwatchable movie. But even she cannot carry the entire film on her back. Instead of making Arthur and Lee literally any other characters outside of the Batman pantheon, Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver sprinkle in information that comic fans know. That doesn’t mean they understand anything about these characters though or why they have a legacy outside of their battles with Batman.

Phillips’ Gotham remains the New York ’80s inspiration the first adopted and its beauty remains the film’s redeeming quality.

Beautiful images at what cost

The thing I did enjoy about this movie were the shots that Phillips uses to show Arthur’s turn into Joker. There is a beautiful shot with Harley putting lipstick on a window and Arthur lining up his smile with it that is gorgeous. I will also give Phillips the credit he deserves for some of the Joker smoking imagery. That’s a fascinating bit of the film.

I also did enjoy a sequence that included Lee and Arthur in a dream sequence as Sonny Bono and Cher from when they did The Sonny & Cher Show together. The bright outfits, bits between Lee and Arthur, and the general brightness to the moment despite their darker intentions worked for me. I can’t say much else did.

The entire film felt like someone told Phillips they liked the first Joker and wanted to see another and that’s the only idea he had with it. Which is not a great way to go about a movie when the first one also said nothing but thought it was saying so much. This movie gets even more frustrating when you throw Lee into this mix.

A disgrace to Harley Quinn’s legacy

The Joker has always been an agent of chaos. That’s one of my biggest issues with the first film. He, in Batman’s rogue gallery, is not an example of mental health or toxic masculinity. Those roles belong to other villains. The Joker just wanted to watch the world born and his desire for destruction is what brought so many of us to his story. The added context that Phillips and company brought to him said nothing new and was a bad remake of Taxi Driver.

Now, with Folie à Deux, they have added Harley Quinn into the mix. She is a representation of manipulation and mental health and we have seen people work incredibly hard to give Harley her own agency. This movie barely makes her a character and then when she does have a moment of “power,” it feels like she doesn’t even deserve it.

Take the change to her origin out of the equation and you still just have a weak version of what Harley Quinn represents. Gaga’s take on the character almost feels more like the actual Joker than Phoenix’s does. She is representative of a person who wants to watch chaos reign and that is, decidedly, not Harley’s point of view as we know it.

If that was the intent, the movie does not do a good enough job of expressing how Harley and Arthur are different. Instead, she comes across as an obsessed fan of his and nothing more. Gaga’s singing voice carries many of the musical numbers but there was also a baffling decision to make her sing “That’s Entertainment” multiple times throughout this, annoyingly so.

For all the talk of this not being a musical, it is. It just isn’t a good one.

Just pointless

I wish I could see why someone greenlit the film, let it get made, and put it into theaters outside of the cash grab that it is. If there was any kind of merit to it, I did not get it while watching the movie. As much as I disliked the first Joker film, I didn’t hate it enough to make me dislike the idea of Folie à Deux.

I truly thought this was going to be the movie that made me see why Todd Phillips did any of this to begin with. Instead, it just felt like a boring attempt at taking people’s money and said nothing important in the process.