“Joker: Folie a Deux” had gargantuan shoes to fill compared to a surprise smash hit of the first film, a dubious announcement for a sequel, and an incredibly promising trailer. However, before discussing this complicated mess of a film, one must know its history and background.
Set your mind back to 2019, when Marvel and DC released films that were part of larger movie universes. At their cores, these films weren’t captivating, they were made just to drag out the series and make the studios money.
These shoddy expectations and wariness surrounding the announcement were shot through the window when the film came out, however, as the film was by no means a typical superhero blockbuster film. It was a work of cinema, with deep themes, interesting writing, dark subject material, a beautiful visual aesthetic, and a very interesting plot structure and framing setup.
During award season, the film was showered with praise and accolades, as was deserved by the art that it was woven with. Then, soon thereafter, a sequel was announced as per the trends of modern film studios.
A rather interesting announcement, as the first film’s greatest aspect was probably its ambiguity, and therefore the need and justification for a sequel was simply not present. These feelings stopped and festered up until the trailer was released for Joker: Folie a Deux, and it was awesome.
Amazing stylistically, promising, and enticing while not revealing much of a complex plot. Therefore, expectations were set high up there, expectations that few films could ever reach, much less a corporate-mandated sequel.
I would say the biggest takeaway from this film that I got was confusion; confusion of genre, confusion of style, and confusion of content. This film was marketed as a “musical” initially, however in the film it doesn’t play out that way, rather coming off as a more standard drama-romance film with random interjections of song and dance.
This made the film feel rather strange and annoying, as you’re trying to follow the plot and then a disconnected scene of Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix singing and dancing is unnaturally interjected between random story beats that makes it all hard to read and feel disconnected.
This aspect kept even throughout the plot of the film, where it felt confusing, hard to understand, and unsure. This aspect is in particular very disappointing when compared to the original film’s clinical and specific pacing and plot approach, where it is all organized so you understand what’s happening, but not so objective so that it leaves you questioning as to the nature of events.
Ultimately, the most disappointing part of this movie was that it felt like a departure from the cinema that was the first film. This film felt like it was unnecessarily pushed out to pull the most money from this “Joker franchise”, which infringed on the cinematic vision behind it. Unlike The Joker (2019), this film seemed to lack a true concrete idea or vision behind what it is supposed to be like they started filming before they could finalize the script.
Instead, those potentially interesting ideas like the film being a musical, the cerebralness of it, and similar things didn’t feel intrinsic to the film, rather feeling taped on to be more ‘interesting’ than it would be otherwise, but instead that they increased the film’s feeling of plasticity and fakeness.
To avoid being overly negative, the acting from Joaquin as Arther Fleck and Gaga as Harley was great, and definitely the highlight of the film. On top of this, there are one or two great scenes in the film that show real promise but are then followed up by some strange and bizarre story choices that confuse and disappoint.
While the film was a indeed great showcase for two incredible actors (Joaquin and Gaga), this film honestly just feels like a real mess. The plot doesn’t seem to try to follow a central “point”, the genre promise of a “musical” isn’t felt here, and the story-writing was bafflingly misguided.
