One of 2024’s biggest movie-biz headlines is the massive failure of Joker: Folie a Deux (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video). The facts: It’s a movie with a $200 million production budget and an estimated break-even point of between $375 and $450 million, and it barely whimpered to $200 million in ticket sales worldwide. Critics and fans united in their uncertain regard for it – both groups posted dismal 32% approval ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. And it therefore failed, mightily, to meet the basest of expectations set by its 2019 predecessor Joker, which grossed $1 billion and scored 11 Oscar noms, including a Best Actor win for lead Joaquin Phoenix. The sequel brings back Phoenix and director Todd Phillips, adding in Lady Gaga for some megawatt star power – but it’s a jukebox musical full of old show tunes, which seems to be a big fat no-no in comic-book-movie realms. For my nickel, Joker landed in the damn-Joaquin’s-really-going-for-it and it-was-good-but-pretty-disturbing-and-I-therefore-never-want-to-see-it-again zones of tempered admiration. But the sequel? Well, it’s – if you’ll pardon the expression – a joke.
The Gist: The opening bit is the best part of the movie: An animated faux-Looney Tunes recap of Joker, but it depicts Joker’s shadow as the real evildoer. This won’t be the last Looney Tunes reference; Joker-slash-Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) resides in Arkham Asylum, a prison for the criminally insane, where TV time more than once consists of Pepe Le Pew cartoons. That’s what you call thematic layering, since we’ll eventually get to the point where Arthur, like the (kinda rapey) cartoon skunk, is obsessively lovesick. But before we get to the mwah-mwah-mwah-madame stuff, we have to get into how Arthur is about to stand trial for murdering five people as we saw in Joker, including the shooting of a talk-show host on live national TV. He’s been in Arkham for a couple years, where he’s bullied by prison guards (led by Brendan Gleeson) who rough him up and make him tell jokes in exchange for cigarettes. And like in the first movie, he just laughs and takes it, except now, he has to take pills every day to keep him chill.
One day, he’s being marched past a music class when he catches the eye of don’t-call-her-Harley-Quinn, er, I mean, Lee Quinzel (Gaga). She’s a Joker superfan, representative of the reprobate group of Gotham City civilians who consider Arthur’s alter-ego an antiestablishment hero. She connects with him via their hatred of their parents; she impresses him when she says she burned down her parents’ apartment building; she really impresses him when she says she’s seen the TV movie about Joker’s killing spree 20 times. And then, she really really impresses him when she sets a fire to stage their escape – during movie night, and big surprise, it’s a Gene Kelly musical – a doomed enterprise, but hey, at least they got to run around the prison grounds together. Arthur subsequently gets tossed in solitary confinement, where, for reasons that elude me, Lee is granted a conjugal visit, where the movie blows a big opportunity to have Joaquin Phoenix sing Foreigner’s ‘Feels Like the First Time.’
Speaking of Joaquin Phoenix singing, some of the songs here are diegetic, and others play out in Arthur’s fantasies, therefore allowing the filmmakers to stage elaborate musical sequences with fancy costumes and lighting without actually springing the guy from the clink. I, for one, think the movie could’ve used more scenes outside of the clink, which is a drab-ass setting that makes post-apocalyptic films look like propaganda for the local travel council. But he has to stay there since Arthur’s trial is the main plot. His lawyer (Catherine Keener) puts together an insanity defense claiming the guy has a split personality, although nobody is buying it (and she probably doesn’t either). The trial is televised, which not only makes the ordeal a Media Circus, but it also allows Arthur, who you’ll surely remember likes to dress up like a clown, to Put On A Show. So Arthur-slash-Joker has the love of a woman, and haters and admirers, which is everything an attention hog needs. But is it what he really wants?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Joker: Folie a Deux is La La Land meets the median quality standard between The Dark Knight and Catwoman, which is not a particularly successful formula.
Performance Worth Watching: Phoenix’s work here is a shell of his upsetting and unforgettable Joker performance, and nobody gave Gaga – mind you, also a deserving Oscar winner, for A Star is Born – anything memorable to do. So that leaves us with… frustration. It leaves us with frustration.
Memorable Dialogue: A psychologist expert witness during the trial pinpoints not only A) the status of the Joker inside Arthur’s mind, but B) the reason Folie a Deux is a musical: “In my view, it’s just a performance.”
Sex and Skin: A no-nudity unsexy sex scene that doesn’t last very long because Arthur doesn’t last very long.
Our Take: Congratulations to Todd Phillips for making a film that gives us absolutely nothing that we want. On one hand, eff you right back, dude, because you didn’t allow Lady Gaga to let rip as the Joker’s rocket queen, not even for a second. On the other, his defiance of expectations is admirable – but only in theory, because he needed a clear and defined artistic vision to pull it off. On the surface, Folie a Deux is oddly lifeless, a musical without joy, a courtroom drama without much drama, a love story inspiring shrugs. Beneath that, it’s a deeply strange film that fails to build upon the provocative emotional substance of its predecessor (the empathy and sorrow we felt for Arthur as a victim of abuse, which mixed uncomfortably with loathing and repulsion once he committed grotesquely violent acts), instead diluting the same idea until it’s a muddy mess, and an absolute slog.
The core theme here seems to be love’s capacity to be both medicine and poison: Arthur never experienced it throughout his life, which made him a monster, the Joker, and now that Lee gives him some, it only empowers the monster. At least that’s what you’ll find if you clear the slop off the lens, so to speak – a slop consisting of go-nowhere psychological prison drama, boilerplate OBJECTION/SUSTAINED courtroom scenes and on-the-nose musical numbers (“If My Friends Could See Me Now,” “‘”(They Long to Be) Close to You”). Speaking of the latter, Gaga never gets an opportunity to belt one out – not even half of one, even – which is the movie-musical equivalent of a slugger being sent in to pinch hit while down a run in the bottom of the ninth, and choosing not to leave the dugout.
I heard an interview with Phillips in which he explained that having Gaga sing to her full capacity would’ve been “out of character,” so he kept her reined in. That’s definitely a choice, one among many in the writing, which is the biggest issue here. Phillips and co-scripter Scott Silver’s screenplay dictates the tempered performances and samey locations via a plot that offers little opportunities for its stars to cultivate chemistry, and plays out primarily in a grimy prison and a drab courtroom. The all-in-his-head fantasy sequences seem like the film’s chance to cut loose, but instead they’re forgettable facsimiles of old TV variety and talk shows. And the hope that Gaga and Phoenix would devour the world with some signature Harley-and-Joker mayhem? That’s our fantasy, and it goes unfounded. Folie a Deux is a 138-minute journey with a miserably empty payoff. To sing its praises would be a delusion.
Our Call: With apologies: Joker: Folie a Peux. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.