Joker: Folie à Deux

Our Review

The original Joker grossed a billion dollars by daring audiences to take a comic book villain seriously. The sequel dares them to stop. Folie à Deux finds Arthur Fleck deteriorating in Arkham, represented by a lawyer pleading split personality, and then reveals itself as a courtroom drama stitched with musical numbers, with Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel as a fellow patient who sees the Joker not as a man but as a project and a crush.

The singing is deliberately unpolished, the fantasy sequences are deliberately threadbare, and the thesis of the exercise seems to be punishing the audience for mythologizing the first film: you fell in love with a symbol, the movie says, and the symbol was a sick man who cannot even carry a chorus. Some of that is genuinely interesting, and Joaquin Phoenix remains riveting, hunched and hollow and fully committed to the bit.

But the film repeats its point for two hours, gives Gaga a character with no interior life and few scenes that pass the Bechdel test of having something to do, and builds to a final scene so nihilistic it torches the value of both movies for a cheap shock. A sequel that interrogates its own existence can work. This one scowls at the question, sings off key about it, and then sets itself on fire. Our score: 3/10. A misfire with real ambition, fascinating to argue about, but a misfire.