Directed by Todd Phillips

Warning: This review contains spoilers and descriptions of sexual violence.

This isn’t a horror movie and doesn’t feature a talking dog, so me even reviewing this is a bit strange for this website, but after watching Joker: Folie A Deux I need to make an exception. I haven’t been able to get that movie out of my head since I saw it, and now I need to inflict that on everyone reading this because Joker: Folie A Deux is one of the worst movies I have seen in a theater, and probably the most disappointing movie I’ve seen ever. Like a lot of people, I really enjoyed the first Joker movie, Joaquin Phoenix’s phenomenal performance elevated the story of a beaten-down Gothamite pushed past his breaking point who becomes the face of something that society wants hidden away. It’s a movie that works because the audience can empathize with someone who, after getting abused by basically everyone in his life, hits back in a big way. You don’t condone Joker’s actions, but you can understand them, and the transformation of Arthur Fleck to Joker is a tragic story that an uncomfortable amount of people can relate to. Why am I talking so much about the first Joker, you may ask? Because Todd Philips thinks that if you liked that movie, then you’re an asshole.

After the thrilling conclusion of Joker, Arthur Fleck is now imprisoned in the high-security Arkham Asylum, where abuse and medication have essentially returned him to his meek and mild state, awaiting trial for everything that happened two years earlier in the previous film. Upon meeting the enigmatic Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel at a music therapy session, Arthur is encouraged to return to his Joker persona by her admiration for his misdeeds. As Arthur’s trial begins, we are treated to basically an hour of rehashing of the first movie, in case you forgot every plot point that happened, with great pains being made to say over and over again that the things Arthur did as Joker in the first film were…bad. With the newfound fame getting to him, Arthur begins to become the Joker again, until it is heavily implied that he is prison raped, and the trauma breaks his Joker persona, revealing the weak and pathetic man Arthur Fleck has been to the world at large. Disgusted by him not being ‘the Joker’, Arthur is rejected by Lee before he is murdered in prison by someone who is implied to become the “real” Joker. Also, this was all a musical.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. Before I dive into the frothing hatred inside of me, I will try to talk about what I liked about Joker 2. Joker 2 starts with a charming cartoon in that old Steamboat Willy style, showing the ending of the first film with Joker’s shadow as his rival/partner in crime. It’s a fun little cartoon and, on its own, isn’t half bad. Although a great deal of vitriol has been spread regarding Joker 2 being a musical, I actually liked that choice and was kind of excited for something very different to happen in the sequel. In Joker, when Arthur gets Jokerized, he often expresses this newfound freedom and power through dancing, particularly after he shoots the guys on the subway and of course during his famous stairway dance number. Using dance and music numbers to explore how Joker perceives the world now that he is fully Jokerized is a great idea, and some of the musical sequences are executed well. And, of course, Joaquin Phoenix is a treasure.

Now, for what is bad about Joker 2. I could just say ‘everything else’ and leave it at that, but I want to go deeper. Everything that Joker set up for the characters, specifically Arthur Fleck, seems completely abandoned in this sequel. With Fleck reverting instantly to his meek personality in prison, we spend long periods hanging out in a dour ‘hospital’ that makes One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest look like a carnival, and his Joker persona is completely discarded until it is reignited by Harleen Quinzel’s “love”. Even when it returns though, Joker’s jokerness is never at the same level as the original film, and this bizarrely pathetic Joker never does anything interesting or shocking. Most of the shocking and depraved acts committed in this movie are performed by the prison guards, who commit murders and rapes with impunity. 

I could forgive any of that if there was a point to it. In the punishingly long courtroom sequences, we meet a cadre of old friends, like Gary Puddles and Sophie Dumond, who all rehash the events of the first movie, highlighting how Joker’s actions harmed them. Aside from being pointless filler sequences in an already filler-full movie, this begs the question of why we need to be told straight out that actions have consequences and that Joker’s misdeeds are to be condemned and not celebrated. Joker has, by the end of the first movie, become a villain protagonist, that was the point of the movie, that he shifted from a meek clown for hire into a symbol of rejecting societal boundaries – especially those concerning violence and criminality. Having smug self-satisfied Harvey Dent look directly into the camera and say “Joker is the bad guy!” feels so absurd that it would be funny if it weren’t so boring! 

I was really hoping that Harvey Dent and Joker would have some scenes together because at this point I viewed them as two opposite sides of the spectrum. Joker represents chaotic freedom while Dent represents the institutions that preserve the current order, the same institutions that failed Arthur Fleck and many people like him. What would make sense to me would have been these two characters directly clashing, their diametrically opposed worldviews giving us some insight into how Dent defends a fundamentally broken system while Joker might have given us more of a look into how his own nihilistic morality defines his actions. Hell, I would have taken some acknowledgment that the ‘fine young men’ the Joker shot in the subway were harassing a woman until they started beating him. There’s no moral complexity to any of these discussions, just that Joker is bad and society is actually perfectly fine. 

This is less of a movie and more of a punishment, Todd Phillips is punishing audiences because we didn’t like his previous movie in the exact way he wanted them to. I suspect that by the end of Joker, we were expected to completely reject Joker as a sympathetic character, but it’s difficult to build up a character to be sympathetic in relatable ways for two hours and then reverse that and expect everyone to instantly turn on them – complex antiheroes, villains, anti-villains, these are all really popular and people love them. They have moral layers and speak to us in terms we understand. To strip out all that discourse and have the point be that Arthur Fleck is a sad pathetic man who is destined to be unloved and manipulated is a level of cynicism and nihilism that makes Joker 2 one of the most depressing exercises in self-revisionism that I’ve ever seen.