Joker: Folie à Deux
Cinemark Buckland Hills 18 XD and IMAX
Manchester
Oct. 6, 2024
This review contains spoilers.
Let’s get this out of the way: Joker: Folie à Deux is not a good movie.
It meanders for two hours with no real point. It gives Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (played as well as she could by Lady Gaga) nothing to do but fawn over Joker. And it wastes Joker himself, forcing us to sit through two hours of “will he or won’t he” with Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix, nailing what uninteresting work they gave him) until he reveals himself in an incredibly anticlimactic courtroom scene.
And don’t get me started on the music. I’m fine with the decision to give the movie musical numbers, but it never fully commits to the premise, mostly relegating them to Arthur’s imagination.
Also, please Hollywood execs, do NOT produce a musical and then hide that aspect of the movie in every trailer released.
Soooooo...where's the musical?
But what I want to talk about is the way that the movie kills the Joker.
Yes, Arthur Fleck literally dies at the end of the movie. He’s stabbed to death by another inmate in what appears to be a setup by the prison guards. As Arthur dies, the other inmate carves a smile into his face, giving the impression that Arthur’s Joker ideology is continuing to spread.
However, Arthur already declared the Joker is dead.
“It was all just a fantasy. There is no Joker. It’s just me,” he says during his trial.
To drive the point home, Fleck rejects the Joker persona two more times in the film’s last 20 minutes. When he is rescued from the aftermath of a car bomb that destroys the courthouse by Joker acolytes, he flees from them instead of embracing them. Then when he encounters Lee one last time, he tells her they can go away together. He wants to escape from the Joker, but the Joker is who Lee loved, not Fleck.
What strikes me about this change is how explicitly it rejects everything the first Joker was about.
I remember when the first Joker was headed towards theaters. Police and talking heads spent months talking about what a dangerous movie it was, how it might inspire certain people to violence. But when I watched Joker, I didn’t see an “incel training manual.” I saw a man who had been pushed off the margins. His life circumstances finally led him to strike back against the people who bullied and tormented him: his mother, three Wall Street bros, a bully from his job. and a bully from television.
It goes without saying that murder is bad, but Arthur Fleck is striking back against systems of oppression that have victimized him, and people like him, his entire life — labor, finance, media. All the people telling us that Joker was bad. And of course, there was no incel revolution or Joker-inspired uprising. People took it for the movie that it was, although the message was not lost.
Joker 2 does everything it possibly can to undermine and reject that messaging. Instead of the Joker persona being a response to a cruel, unjust world, it gets turned into a split personality as a result of abuse. The movie breaks Arthur Fleck with the same kind of torment from authority that moved him to act in the first movie.
Then there’s the courtroom scene, where Gary Puddles (Leigh Gill) tells Joker what a terrible person he is for murdering their coworker. But he doesn’t focus on what Joker did to the coworker. He focuses on how Joker made his life unlivable. So does Sophie Dumond (a brief cameo by Zazie Beetz), explaining how people began to harass her after Arthur/Joker was arrested.
Coming to terms with the consequences of one’s own actions is a potentially interesting story, but the entire point of the first Joker was how an indifferent (at best) society drove Arthur Fleck to murder. That is lost when Fleck accepts full responsibility for the murders at the end of his trial.
My question is: why? Why did Todd Phillips, who directed and wrote both Jokers (along with Scott Silver and Bob Kane). undo what they had accomplished in the first film? Were they afraid of what they’d created? Did they decide they didn’t want to keep making Joker movies? Was there studio interference? I don’t know, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so whiplashed by the sequel to a movie.
In the end, Joker: Folie à Deux isn’t just a bad movie. It undoes its fascinating predecessor on a level that hasn’t been seen since Terminator 3 ruined that franchise. That’s a real shame. Joker deserved better.
NEXT
Joker: Folie à Deux is playing in wide release.
Jamil is still determining his next move. Stay tuned!
