Joker: Folie a Deux Review

“Got a joke for us today?” – Jackie Sullivan

“I’d go as far as to say that Joker is a damning indictment of mental health care and the lack of empathy and compassion in our society today. Society created the Joker and then condemns their own creation as if he’s not their fault.

As the film progresses there’s a scene where Fleck’s psyche tips and he visibly becomes The Joker, wildly unpredictable in all his homicidal manic glory. You can see it in his eyes and his posture. And that’s when it clicked. Much as I like my comic book characters – I realised that maybe unwittingly, Todd Phillips had given us the origin of Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight. Not the one the Joker claims in that film, but then the character maintains that if he has to have an origin story, he wants it to be multiple choice.”

I wrote that. Yup. I wrote that back in 2019 in my review of Joker. If you’re so inclined, you can read the whole review on the old site at this link.

I mention that to establish that once, I liked where director Todd Phillips was heading with the Joker as a character, and how he might fit in to the Batman universe. Five years later, I’m here to tell you that in my humble opinion, he has totally blown it. I haven’t experienced this sense of stunned disappointment in a film involving any Batman Universe characters since Joel Schumacher defecated Batman & Robin onto cinema screens.

The first film gave a firm foundation that this was a different take on Batman’s most enduring foe, who has been in print for 84 years – debuting in 1940, in the same issue of Batman as the Catwoman. This wasn’t the Joker who’d taken a dip in a vat of chemicals, which snapped his mind and forever altered his appearance. This was a more realistic take. This Joker preceded Batman’s crime busting crusade. Fond as I am of the comic book origin, I could accept this alternative take on the story.

So where did it all go wrong? Joachim Phoenix gives a solid performance as Arthur Fleck/Joker. Lady Gaga is surprisingly effective as a somewhat understated Harleen Quinzel. (The casting of Lady Gaga was a point of concern – then I read it was going to be a musical, which gave me a whole NEW point of concern.)

This is a film that has no real point. It goes, quite literally nowhere. The film begins with Fleck/Joker in a high security mental institution, awaiting trial for his murder spree in the previous film. There, he meets Harleen Quinzel, soon to be Harley Quinn, who tells him she’s there because she burned down her parents’ home. (So, we’ve instantly dropped the established origin of Quinzel coming into Joker’s life as a criminal psychologist, whom he turns to evil – making her the ultimate Stockholm Syndrome victim – I guess Todd Philips who wrote this was emboldened by the critical success of the first movie and felt he knew better.)

I had (foolishly, it appears) assumed they met in the asylum, broke out and went on a crime spree. Uh – no. The whole two hours and fifteen interminable minutes crawls through Fleck’s time awaiting trial, the trial itself, and the aftermath. Quinzel isn’t really used to much effect at all, and is pretty much a wasted character, apart from giving Fleck someone to obsess over (a reversal on the source material, where she’s the one hopelessly infatuated.)

And they keep bursting out into song. For no reason. Okay, I can accept that there are times when they don’t ACTUALLY burst out into a song and dance number, it’s part of Fleck’s delusional fantasies, but man, it wears thin really, really quickly.

Ultimately, there’s no crime spree, there’s no kick to the film, unlike the first. It’s a downbeat, depressing exercise in the physical abuse suffered in the institutions by the mentally ill, a morbid take on one of the longest enduring, most familiar comic book villains of all time, but one that makes the character rather dull, and a victim. It takes some doing to make The Joker boring. He’s supposed to be larger than life, not a barely mumbling idiot.

Phillips does actually take a little bit of time to establish that this film does indeed take place in Batman’s universe, we’re in Gotham after all, and we see district attorney Harvey Dent suffer an injury which disfigures half his face which according to established lore, will make him the bipolar Two-Face but otherwise, we’re left with a turgid, pretentious art movie that unwisely tries its best to distance itself from the source material and fail in its attempt to appeal to all but a few.

Phoenix and Gaga should’ve had better material to work with. This is ultimately a film that fails to live up to either its hype or its potential, and falls short of the sum of its parts.

Rob Rating = 3