Joker: Folie à deux

Well this is going to piss off some people and as always, I don’t care. The first Joker movie was garbage. It was not a good film, it was an even worse comic book movie. And anyone that enjoyed it is an immediate red flag. That’s why when they announced the second one I could do nothing but roll my eyes. But when they announced it was a musical I could do nothing but laugh. Because the demographic for musicals are the exact opposite of the demographic for the Joker movie. And I knew it would piss off the basement dwellers that made that film their whole personality. And boy was I right. So regardless of how this movie actually turns out, whatever quality rating I give it I know that the Joker-bros hated it and that fills me with immeasurable joy.

So my first issue is that they put Harley in the hospital with him and not his doctor. That is super terrible. Now I know I shouldn’t have expected comic book accuracy or competency from this movie and its filmmakers, but it's kind of like a huge part of her character. She is DOCTOR Harleen Quinzel.

It's very clear from the beginning that music is going on in his head. Even before anyone starts actually singing, he is clearly absorbed by a performance going on inside his mind.

Harley sets a fire to get them out of the mental hospital, but they don’t actually escape. Because they are both descending deeper into madness and delusion and they get held up by their little musical number.

So here’s the deal: casting Lady Gaga as Harley in a musical version of this was brilliant, she was the perfect casting choice. But we stripped Harley of everything that makes her Harley. No accent, no degree apparently, nothing that ties her to her source material at all. I suppose that tracks considering that the first movie gave Joker a wild, out of left field backstory that was closer to Lex Luthor’s backstory than his own.

Arthur decides to represent himself in court, which of course does not go well. He seems to have adopted the dialect of an old timey southern lawyer. The fact that this judge is allowing this at all is so unrealistic. So suspense of disbelief is really easy when the film is good and easy to lose yourself in. But this isn’t good. It’s got the same energy as the first Joker but it is very much making fun of its fanbase, that’s really not the problem. The problem is mine, I hate Joker in and out of comics and anything centering him is immediately insufferable. Creatives in Hollywood know that there are other Batman villains, right?

There really wasn’t much of a story here. The plot was his trial I guess? Also he falls in love with Harley but her introduction was so thin and detached that it is just something that happened we can not call that a true plot point. Arthur also paints his face in Joker makeup for court, that isn’t a plot point either.

A lot of people were freaking out about the implied rape of Arthur by the prison guards to that I say that if Joker was a woman we would have had to watch a very graphic, drawn out scene with nothing left to be implied at all. So…you aren’t getting a whole lot of sympathy from me at all. The only issue I have with the existence of that scene is that it implies that these guards raped the psychosis out of him? He basically concedes during his closing statement and that was the biggest problem with that scene. Rape changes a person but it NEVER makes them better, that's a wildly harmful thing to put out into the world.

The ending with Arthur escaping just to be killed was actually really smart. It shows that Joker is more of a mindset than a person and that is at least some kind of commentary.

Yeah…a whole lot of nothing happens in this movie. Obviously most of the music was great because Lady Gaga has a phenomenal voice. Also centering ANOTHER movie around a criminal was certainly a choice. If you are out here empathizing with serial killers then you have serious psychological problems. And having a whole movie where you don’t care about the main character is a hard sell. There really isn’t anything redeemable about this movie but I’ll give it a point for Gaga, 1/10.