‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Review: Send Out the Clowns

'Joker: Folie À Deux' (2024)

With all the critics and praise around 2019’s Joker, it felt inevitable that a sequel would give audiences something more to chew on. Whether it be an A-tier villain's rise to infamy or another glorification of violence on the big screen, fans expected Joker: Folie à Deux to deliver a bigger bang for their buck, even if it is a musical. But what co-screenwriter and director Todd Philips gave us was an exhausting movie that wishes it could be something else.

The problem is that Joker: Folie à Deux hates us for bringing it into existence.

Joker was a well-crafted—if at times deeply insensitive—opportunistic story filled to the brim with nihilism, as bleak as 2019 itself. It pulled from past media (The King of Comedy, the 1987 on-air suicide of Pennsylvania political figure R. Budd Dwyer, Network) to tell a story about the dangers of giving a platform to someone abandoned by the world in every way, allowing them to become even more unhinged. But not everyone could see this message clearly in a movie that went on to make over $1 billion at the box office.

Joker: Folie à Deux is much more heavy-handed in the way it delivers the same story. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is now on trial for his crimes in the first film. His dreams have been dashed, he’s broken down into a shell of a person, and he exists simply because there is nothing else to do. While everyone else refers to him as Joker, his defense lawyer (Catherine Keener) is the only person who sees Arthur and wants to protect him from the world that seeks to exploit him.

But all that sympathy is sucked out of the room when Arthur starts a relationship with Lee (Lady Gaga), a manipulative, compulsive liar who is obsessed with the Joker. Their love—and Joker’s personality—is often expressed through broadly appealing ‘50s and ‘60s standards, giving the audience something to chew on in the moments surrounding Arthur.

Arthur starts to see the cracks in the façade after Lee convinces him to fire his lawyer and represent himself. The crowd erupts in joy at seeing their icon act chaotically and push back against a system oppressing the common man, but Arthur can sense that everyone is performing around him, not listening to him. At some point, the fantasy of the Joker can no longer protect Arthur. The electric chair is inevitable. His internal doomsday clock is ticking.

At the film’s best, Arthur sheds his skin and tells his truth—he is afraid of what the world has turned him into.

This moment of honesty is Philips showing his hand to the audience. He feels upset to have to sit down and make another movie that simplifies the themes of the first film. But the emotional pull to Arthur isn’t there. He isn’t becoming a more sinister villain, nor is he trying to right any wrongs. He is a static character in a character-driven narrative, and that’s a tough sell to get audiences on board.

What made it an even tougher sell for audience members who praised the first movie but couldn’t read between the lines (a la Fight Club) was the fact that Joker 2 is a musical. Not a proper musical, but a jukebox one that forced Gaga to meet Phoenix’s limited vocal range, with no clear rules for why musical numbers were happening. The first song is introduced in Arthur’s fantasy, setting the expectation that songs will start in a fantasy world and gradually bleed into reality as the complexity of Arthur’s personality and agenda grows. This idea is reinforced during a TV interview when Arthur breaks into song for Lee, who watches on a rainy street somewhere in Gotham. But this idea is broken in the second song, performed wonderfully by Gaga, as she sings in the film’s reality after escaping a burning Arkham. Why is it in the real world and not the fantasy one?

Chalk it up to an inability to write a coherent musical, but it comes off like Philips didn’t care how the music made its way into a scene.

Phoenix’s limited vocal range hinders his and Gaga’s musical performances, but his physical acting makes up greatly for this limitation. From tap dancing to comedic pouting that teeters dangerously close to the edge of sanity, Phoenix highlights Joker's madness and finds Arthur's sad humanity. Much like Gaga’s equally outstanding performance, there is a mastery of craft unfolding before us that entrances us. It’s easy to look at their performances alone and see a great movie.

Give me Joker meets La La Land anytime, and I’d be a happy duck, but this is nowhere near as notable as either of those films. It’s a risk—a risk I’m happy exists—but I’m confounded by what Philips wanted to do with the movie’s overall bleakness, which bogs down the dark beauty of a demented world often lit by neon lights and cultural gags.

Call it the doom of entertainment, the folly of putting something artificial on a pedestal without engaging with its content, or maybe it’s just a filmmaker tired of the Hollywood movie-making machine. However, the lack of depth in the world and characters leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

If you want to understand what this film could be, look to Leigh Gill’s performance as Gary Puddles on the witness stand. Puddles, a fellow clown spared by Arthur in the first film, is the only person who treats Arthur like a human being who needs help. Despite being spared, Puddles became afraid of the world because of what Arthur did. The audience laughs as Puddles walks away due to his dwarfism, but his fear of the Joker—whether as an idea or a person—strikes a chord with Arthur. For the first time, he understands that what he did was wrong. The fantasy breaks, and, as Arthur says to Lee on the iconic stairway, we don’t want to continue entertaining a dangerous idea.

In the end, Lee tells Arthur that there is no reality outside the violent fantasy of entertainment, and he is left in the same place he’s always been—abandoned by the thing he believes could save him.

'Joker: Folie À Deux' (2024)

“Messy” is the best way to describe Joker: Folie à Deux, but it’s hard not to appreciate the risk Philips was taking, even if those risks didn’t pay off. The question we’re left with is, “Who was this made for?”

The people who loved Joker didn’t come back for seconds because it was billed as a musical. The people who hated it didn’t return to hate-watch. So, who’s left?

The people who understood and appreciated the first film expected a project that could either build on the Joker mythos or present fresh, surface-level commentary on the state of the world. Instead, we got a film that felt too exhausted to exist after the opening cartoon. If Joker: Folie à Deux doesn’t want to be here, then why should we?

Grade: C