- Starring
- Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga
- Director
- Todd Phillips
- Rating
- R
- Genre
- Crime, Drama, Musical
- Release date
- October 4, 2024
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Joker: Folie à Deux” continues the story of Arthur Fleck, who is now institutionalized at Arkham State Hospital. Two years after the events of the first film, Arthur falls in love with fellow inmate Harleen Quinzel.
Joker: Folie à Deux Review
While 2019’s Joker was somewhat divisive among fans, with purists resisting the reimagining of a beloved, then almost 80-year-old villain, most critics and the lion’s share of audiences applauded director Todd Phillips’s (The Hangover) new gritty take on The Clown Prince of Crime. The film’s perfunctory attempt at anti-capitalism notwithstanding, Joaquin Phoenix‘s portrayal of a broken and abused man lost in a world growing ever more violent and harsh, was mesmerizing. It gave us the first glimpse of a reasonable explanation as to how a person could believably be transformed into the quintessential comic book villain.
Once again, Phoenix proves he is the American Daniel Day-Lewis and one of the greatest film actors of all time. His cellular-level investment in the character and the film’s unfortunate narrative is worth watching as an academic study of the craft if nothing else. Although no one gives a bad performance or even a mediocre one, Folie à Deux’s narrative redundancies preclude empathic connection, leaving Phoenix’s otherworldly talent as the sole oasis in which to take refuge. However, his brilliance is so great that it washes out all others by comparison, making an already deeply conceptually flawed film feel uneven.
Whereas 2019’s Joker was an origin story, Folie à Deux sets forth to undo Arthur Fleck’s metamorphosis and reset him back to his sadsack factory settings. Not even Joaquin Phoenix’s undeniably brilliant performance can save the film from its premise, as the character does little more than get shifted from one location in Arkham to another, getting abused along the way. Arthur is sad in his cell; then he’s sad in the common room. Oh, look, now he’s sad in solitary confinement.
Helping nothing, the Joker: Folie à Deux is peppered with depressing and narratively jarring musical numbers, the latest in Fleck’s delusional resume. As each one brutalizes audiences with its heavy-handed symbolism of events already fully fleshed out moments before, the most interesting part of the film quickly becomes your phone’s clock. And that really is the film’s greatest weakness: it doesn’t tell us anything that we don’t already know about the character or allow us to connect to him as we did in the original. Sure, it hamfists in a “twist” in its final moments that would be a major reveal were this film not in its own contained universe completely divorced from all other cinematic universes. The result is a feeling of soggy acceptance of Fleck’s fate and a massive wasted opportunity.
Ultimately, Joker: Folie à Deux is two hours and eighteen minutes of the same story beat repeated in different rooms, locales, and via continuity-breaking musical numbers, and it is a complete waste of time. If you enjoyed the 2019 film, don’t ruin it by watching this one.
WOKE ELEMENTS
Hardly Quinn
- The original film concluded with Joker rising from the wreckage of Arthur Fleck, transformed into a powerful, charismatic figure—albeit murderous and evil. Folie à Deux exists only to once again deconstruct the man, and strong, independent Harley Quinn and her manipulations are the mechanism by which it takes place.
- It is a textbook example of a male legacy character being overshadowed and diminished by a “modern” woman.
James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
8 comments
Jim
October 5, 2024 at 8:48 am
There’s nothing woke about the movie. It’s just a bad movie. But since it’s flopping, the fandom menace crowd will call it “woke” to justify why it failed.
James Carrick
October 5, 2024 at 9:59 am
ooooorrrrr, it was both a bad movie and woke, as we detail in the WOKE ELEMENTS section.
Arkane
October 5, 2024 at 1:03 pm
Its woke af, I think you watched a different movie.
Sweet Deals
October 5, 2024 at 8:36 pm
I didn’t see this movie or the one that preceded it (yet). There’s only so much depressing stuff I’m willing to take.
In the versions of Batman that I’m familiar with, Harley Quinn was originally the Joker’s psychiatrist, until she started taking pity on her patient and fell in love with him. She voluntarily became the Joker’s sidekick despite the fact that the Joker has no feelings for her and has no remorse about abusing her. It tells a familiar story about how a woman’s nurturing instincts can work against her and drive her toward evil. The summary for this movie suggests a reverse narrative: that a man can suffer when a woman manipulates and takes advantage of him. Granted, this version of the Joker is broken down and vulnerable in the first place, so he might be easy prey for an evil, vindictive woman. He sure sounds like he could use several doses of Joker laughing gas to help put a smile on his face.
The review avoids spoilers and doesn’t go into detail about how this Harley Quinn treats her respective Joker, but it is the sole point of woke contention. Is it woke for a once-weak female character to be rewritten to overpower her once-strong male counterpart? In most cases, yes. Is this reverse narrative grounds for a compelling story about how broken people turn toward evil? You tell me.
dvaz
October 6, 2024 at 2:52 am
This first move was boring af. I can’t imagine how much more boring this can be.
Mike
October 7, 2024 at 6:56 am
I disagree. Lady Gaga is extremely woke and divisive. She is the same reason I uninstalled Fortnite after my nephew spent months begging me to play it with him. I installed the game finally and she was the first thing I saw at the menu screen and was just like nah. The chick sung the inauguration for Biden and constantly uses her platform to stoke the flames of racism and bigotry and to attack Christians and conservatives. Making her a main character in this film automatically makes the film woke and it’s the main reason myself and a lot of my conservative friends had no interest in watching it.
SHeikVoigt
October 10, 2024 at 7:01 am
I’m surprised you didn’t mention (as a woke element) that Arthur kisses another male inmate early on in the movie.
I get that the movie views it as a “joke” or “prank” he’s peer pressured into sort of (?) but it was super gross to see going into it thinking Lee was the only woke element I had to think about.
The fact that the male inmate follows Arthur around like a lost puppy the rest of the movie made me concerned there might be some further development there, as well, so it would’ve been nice to know it was one and done ahead of time.
Thankfully, there wasn’t anything else like that with him, but my husband and I were both off-put by it.
We were also just super disappointed with the movie in general, having gone into it blind (with the exception of checking here for “woke elements” beforehand). We both really enjoyed seeing the first movie for our wedding anniversary in 2019 and were pretty excited to go see this one for our anniversary date this year. We just like going to the movies so, even if the movie isn’t great, we usually still have a fun time. Not this time though, my poor husband started groaning every time they would start to sing like “here we go again. . .” and I think our favorite part was at the near-end of the movie when Arthur puts his hand over Lee’s mouth and tells her to stop singing.
MacArthur
October 29, 2024 at 10:27 pm
They can’t help themselves . They simply cannot stand by and let a good male character exist. It’s like when your mom made you bring your younger sibling to your friends house. Every movie with a good male character must bring along a strong female. It’s the law. And they know everybody hates it. Because if Netflix had a “non-woke” category, it would be the most popular category on Netflix.