Terrible Blog For Terrible People

 Joker 2: Todd Phillips Forgets to Yell "Cut!"

Written by: Scott Silver, Todd Phillips
Directed by: Todd Phillips
Starring: Walking Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Zazie Beetz for about 3 minutes

Also known as Joker: Fondle à Dude. MY COLUMN:

It's not easy being The Only Person Who Clocked Joker Right. That's a lot of responsibility, and it weighs heavy on my shoulders. The load only gets heavier, though: a lot of people are being pretty hyperbolic about this dumb comic book movie for adult babies, and it's up to me to set the record straight: 

This movie sucks about as much as people have been saying.

Ordinarily I don't like to include plot synopses in my reviews as they're more fun to discover while watching the movie, but this one isn't worth seeing. Get this: the whole thing starts with a lousy cartoon sequence, seemingly animated by someone with a gun to his head, involving the Joker and his shadow recreating the De Niro murder from the previous movie. The cartoon mercifully ends and we see after killing six people, including one on national television, Arthur "Joker" Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) and his gross alien body are imprisoned in the Gotham State Home for the Criminally Fucked in the Head, where he's looked after by Officer Seamus O'Stereotype (Brendan Gleeson). Things are about as cheerful as a Lars von Trier movie in this musical comic book movie, but things soon look up: he meets fellow inmate Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga, née Stefani Germanotta). They spark up a lil romance and he goes on trial for his killing spree, battling young District Attorney Harvey Dent (Jared Kushner). Then a buncha stupid shit happens.

A word on the musical segments that caused so much derision in the pre-release announcements: they're really not that bad. Lady Gaga's a fantastic singer and Phoenix is perfectly sufficient. The song choices are mostly old standards and they all sound good, which is what really matters. Most people seem to find the transitions to them to be jarring, and they can be, but I found them welcome: I much preferred the musical interruptions to the grimy, depressing, meandering main story. The whole story takes place in two locations: Gotham State Home for the Perpetually Naughty and the Gotham State Court House, both of which are about as visually interesting as they sound. Forgive me if I cracked a smile when the film transitions to colorful soundstages and they play some nice music. I'm even considering downloading some of the songs. 

Everything else is pretty bad, though. I'm not sure where the movie was supposed to go, but it's debatable that it goes anywhere at all. There's just too many narrative problems to overcome. I'm not entirely sure what the point of Quinn's muddled backstory was. The musical sequences are almost always depictions of the way Fleck feels in his head, which worked in the first movie by misleading the audience, but no one in the movie or the audience thinks he's actually singing along with The Bee Gees. The whole thing is filmed in this grimy environment and the humorless narrative makes the 138-minute runtime feel interminable. The closest I came to a laugh was when the judge says, in effect, "ain't no law says a man can't wear clown makeup in the courtroom." 

All rise, The Honorable Air Bud Referee is presiding.

The case for the defense is the ol' classic "hey hey, whoa whoa, I was crazy at the time y'Honor!" maneuver. Going with multiple personality disorder to keep out of the electric chair is probably something tried by the Joker of the comics, tv shows, movies, lunchboxes, etc.—but we never see that, we just assume it. Seeing it play out on screen, one can't help but be reminded of Two Face. This gets to the meat of the problem with Joker: Folie à Deux: something just doesn't feel right here. Joker worked well because it felt like so unlike other comic book movies, almost like a beloved director had taken the subject material and spun it for a ride in more mature territory. Maybe growing the subject material up would have the same effect on the audience. Not including a guy who dresses up in a mask and tights and fights ne'er-do-wells by night only helped the movie. We've got this squeakquel and too many passing references to DC: Harvey Dent, Gotham State Loony Bin, Harley Quinn, and the crushing expectation that Joker will do something of consequence. We've strayed so far from the source material and yet we've still got these references to it. There are certain rules you need to have for some characters. The coyote can never catch the roadrunner. Something's wrong here, you can just feel it. 

Wait, what?

Then the rape scene happens. Coming back from his much-publicized trial, Officer Gleeson McGillicutty and the other orderlies don't much care for the cut of Joker's jib. They take the protagonist of this movie to the showers, wipe the makeup from his face, pull his pants down, and gang rape him. They toss him on the floor, and he quivers on the ground in a fetal position as they strangle his best friend, who tried to defend him. Listening to his best friend struggle to breathe his last, Fleck whimpers and reminisces about his first murders. I legitimately thought he was going to get off on a technicality because of the abuse he suffered at the hands of the guards, but bizarro courthouse rules and cinematic allegories can only go so far; this is just cruelty for cruelty's sake. He returns to court and renounces Joker as a persona, saying it was him all along. As the jury announces its guilty verdicts, the courthouse wall explodes and he's rescued by Joker fanboys. Then he goes back to the mental hospital because he's sad because Lady Gaga dumped him (she was in love with the psychopath, not the freaky sadboy who needs invisalign and a good hug). Thankfully this scene does not get a dream sequence musical number.

Todd Phillips doesn't seem to give much of a shit about DC comics or the continuity of such things, and one can hardly blame him. Hell, I respect him for it. Take a character and go exploring, let us know what you find. It just doesn't seem like this would work even if you changed the names of all the characters and places. He almost does that, too: Fleck isn't The Joker. I'm not saying his performance doesn't match up to Mark Hammill, Jack Nicholson, or Heath Ledger; he admits Joker doesn't exist and he was the one doing all the killings. Then The Joker appears.

Maybe I should explain this.

This is how I felt while typing this.

There's a reason they keep saying "Joker" and not "The Joker." Joker is just a manifestation of all the childhood trauma and rejection from society Fleck has felt over the years, suddenly bursting out of his psyche, killing his perceived bullies. By the end of the movie he admits it was really him all along, not a split personality; you can't separate him from his murders. This turns off Quinn so much she dumps him, which confuses the appallingly dimwitted Fleck. He goes back to the insane asylum and is murdered by an inmate who's implied to be The Joker with which we're more familiar. Joker was just an inspiration of sorts for The Joker. This might sound a bit confusing, but it was kinda telegraphed: watching the first movie, no one was thinking "oh yeah, this clod is gonna become a criminal mastermind." Hell, Todd Phillips stated explicitly that wasn't going to happen. If it had, Joker would've been geriatric when Batman started getting into the swing of things. No, Joker was just some sad, mentally disabled weirdo who served as an influence on a much younger version of The Joker, who wasn't in the first movie and has approximately 2 minutes of screen time in the sequel. I can't imagine Phillips is going to make another one of these things showing this new version of The Joker, nor can I imagine anyone wanting to see it, but if he does maybe he can show us a young Bruce Wayne being inspired by a cop who uses a grappling hook.

Is this a good ending, having your main character get violently killed? It's surprising, to say the least; it elicited a ton of gasps from my surprisingly packed theater, but it also makes both movies feel completely pointless, especially the second one. Where were you going with all this, Todd? What were you trying to say? Humanity is cruel and the pursuit of happiness leads only to ignominy, disappointment, and the grave? We have Michael Haneke movies for that. 

I think I still like the first movie, but now I'm not sure I want to revisit it. This is a rare case where a sequel does what everyone fears: make the previous movie worse just by its existence. I thought Todd Phillips had something fairly insightful to say about the way society treats people, even if a bunch of people missed his message or twisted it deliberately to say something else. Now that I've seen Joker: Folie à Deux, I'm beginning to feel like I was fooled. This is what you meant, Todd? This is what you were going for all along? I'm not sure what I wanted from the second movie, but if I'd known it was leading here I would've preferred the first movie ended this way: