Joker: Folie à Deux

"Shared madness" is the direct translation for Joker: Folie à Deux's extended title. The idea was to unite the distorted psychotic and now imprisoned murderer Arthur "Joker" Fleck with the equally as murderous Batman antagonist and Gotham City icon Harley Quinn in a tumultuous and wild sequel. The only problem is that The Hangover's Todd Philips seems to have gone into this production with some kind of grandiose delusion himself, high on his own success, and forgetting to write a decent script in the first place.

Joker was brilliant. Let's clarify and establish that much right away. Sure, Philips had peeked at Martin Scorsese's classics Taxi Driver and King of Comedy and offered surprisingly few original ideas, but Joker was dazzling proof that it's not always necessary to be purely original either. What we got was a grippingly dark, fascinating portrait of the man who would become Batman's arch-rival and Gotham's worst villain, a stylistic character study painted in blood and white make-up, a film that was drenched in atmosphere and character, thanks in no small part to a stunning Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role.

In Joker: Folie à Deux, everything is worse. The film picks up from Arthur's time at Arkham Asylum, where he is now imprisoned for his crimes in the previous film. This is where Philips spends the entire first half of his hotly anticipated sequel and I understand the idea behind it. The concept is about building a tight, dirty, dark atmosphere about insanity, and how isolation and exclusion create hard but emotionally-fragile men. The problem is that Philips' version of Shawshank Redemption doesn't work. The script limps along, the character study feels like one long repetition and the musical numbers are often laughable.

The second half of this film is a claustrophobic courtroom drama in which an obstinate Fleck stands trial before the Gotham City jury and at no point during either the first or second part does it feel like this is a serious attempt to really try and build on the greatness of the previous film. Rather, this feels like a very hastily thrown together idea for a play that could perhaps act as a cut-in montage in a film about Arthur taking his place as Gotham's Clown Prince of Crime, rather than anything else. Few dramaturgical ideas have been allowed to boil over here, few elements have been worked in that entertain or provoke any kind of thought, and Joker lacks the typical Joker gravitas too. Harley doesn't feel like the Harley we know and love either, and Harvey Dent is so under-represented and unfinished as a character that it's hard to understand Philips' intentions at all.

Why make a film about Harley, Joker, and Two-Face in Gotham that, as the film goes on, has less and less to do with the world from which they originated? The only natural progression here, for this sequel, would be to throw up a smart and manipulative Arthur against Batman and throw in Harley Quinn as a foolish sidekick. Who really wants to see another film about the Joker where Batman is not represented? Who cares what happens in the courtroom when we all know he slips out of Arkham Asylum countless times in all the years he's been battling Batman in other mediums and universes?

I can definitely appreciate that the director is trying to make the comic book-clichéd characters more human and to make the world feel more real, however, there is an obvious and painfully boring lack of opposites here. Nuances are welcome and not everything has to be black and white, and just as Harley and Joker can be misunderstood, characterised by alienation and loneliness, Batman can be a product of the problematic upbringing we all know too. That, in itself, makes Batman the best comic book character in the world, and none of that is represented in this film. Not one bit. The dichotomy between good and evil is completely absent, and without at least some sort of threat of the Batman's presence, Philip's tentative attempt at yet another deep dive into Arthur's psyche feels almost pointless.

On top of all these problems, I think the musical part of this film isn't even worth the time of day talking about it. Phoenix can't sing to begin with and sounds like two cats fighting most of the time, and his attempts at a Dean Martin-styled tone just feel out of place and ridiculous. Lady Gaga makes valiant attempts to take over almost every musical number and does so as grandly and pompously as she can, but not for a second does the song Philips has written here work. It really just falls flat and ultimately feels like an expensive, bloated, risky experiment that failed on all fronts.