Joker: Folie à Deux Review

There is something almost admirable in the contempt. Phillips took the most misappropriated character of the previous decade and built a film arguing that Arthur Fleck was never a revolutionary, never interesting, and never really the Joker, then delivered that argument through standards mumbled into a prison microphone. As criticism it is coherent. As a film it is inert. The structure is a trial that repeats the first movie's events in testimony, interrupted by fantasy numbers staged with real skill by Lawrence Sher's camera but sung deliberately badly, so neither the drama nor the songs build.

Joaquin Phoenix is committed and physically extraordinary. Lady Gaga is the one performer who could have detonated the concept and the script keeps her at arm's length, giving her a Harley who is a device for the thesis rather than a person. Brendan Gleeson's guard is the only relationship with weight. The ending is a deliberate act of demolition, and whatever you think of it as a statement, two hours of a man being told he is nothing is a hard sit.