After leaving my theater screening of Joker: Folie à Deux (2024), above all other emotions, I mostly felt confused. As I walked home and furiously texted everyone that this movie was nothing more than a pile of garbage, I kept asking myself: “What on earth was the point of this?” I can’t even try to hide my disdain for this film. 

Set two years after the events of Todd Phillip’s 2019, billion-dollar hit Joker, we return to Gotham to see Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), now imprisoned in Arkham Asylum, stand trial for his five murders as Joker. Painfully incorporating multiple genres, Phillips combines the superhero film with the courtroom drama and the musical resulting in a confused jumble of half-baked ideas and tone-deaf inclusions. What’s left is a sequel that reveals that Phillips isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. 

The film opens with a Looney-tunes-style short of Joker returning to the television set we came to know in the first film, and then we spend the rest of the two-hour-eighteen-minute feature going back and forth between Arkham and the courtroom, with very little access to greater Gotham. 

A common theme during the entire film, which also stars Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel, is half-baked because Phillips refuses to develop his Gotham with any type of world-building. Worse, though, he refuses to give Arthur Fleck, Quinzel, or any other character a sense of development. By the end, Phillips not only manages to avoid developing his central character further but he strips away every sense of agency that he built in the first film. Never have I seen a sequel go backward, but Joker: Folie à Deux, proves there is a first time for anything. 

With an impressive box office and award season high (including 11 Academy Award nominations and two wins) Phillips managed to surprise with Joker, an impressive stand-alone comic book film, something different, polarizing, and discourse-inducing. DC/Warner Bros was continuously falling short of Marvel-level success until Joker cleared over a billion dollars. It was a lucky break for the Hangover (2009) director.  

And after saying goodbye to Phoenix’s Oscar-winning Joker and returning to the mess of a Universe attempt by Zack Snyder and others, many of us closed the book on Phillip’s Scorsese-lookalike adaptation that scraped by with a decent enough following. When it was announced that Gaga would supposedly be playing Harley Quinn in a musical titled “a shared illusion of two,” I hesitantly accepted that maybe Phillips has enough talent and unique conceptual details for the sequel to be something entertaining. 

It wasn’t.

If one theme of the film is half-baked, then the other is a lack of commitment because Phillips doesn’t commit to any of the possible strong angles this film gives him. 

First, for a sequel of a film that focused on one character, Phillips doesn’t spend enough time with Arthur Fleck. And as a “shared illusion, delusion, or madness” marketed to us as a Bonnie and Clyde-type story, Gaga’s Lee gets no arc, development, or treatment other than half-assed performances and set musical numbers. 

Additionally, as a musical, the film never commits to the over-the-top or choreographed spectacle that we expect from the genre today. The songs painfully stay within the diegesis, making for awkward numbers that add little to the plot and leave us — and the characters — scratching their heads.

In between the painful jukebox songs and the courtroom scenes are nothing extraordinary or even “average.” The scenes weirdly bring back characters from the first film, including a surprisingly great moment with Leigh Gill returning as Puddles, but add nothing to the story other than breaking down Arthur Fleck, making him more and more pathetic. And after the high he ends on in the first film, one can’t help but wonder who this sequel was trying to cater to. 

For fans of the original, this film is a tragic disappointment that I am choosing to completely separate from the first success. For fans of Joker the character or the Batman comics, this film doesn’t commit enough to the superhero genre to add anything to the existing portfolio of adaptations. For everyone else, this doesn’t commit to any idea of the spectacle of mental disorders, police/prison brutality, manipulation, or anarchy to say anything profound. Rather, all the previous ideas mentioned are included in a way that is not only useless and confusing but tone-deaf.

The fact is, Todd Phillips isn’t the director able to handle such provocative ideas. A film using the superhero genre and villain origin story to discuss such dark topics? Possible. Phillips directing it successfully is impossible, and Joker: Folie à Deux proves that. Any success or steps that the first Joker might have taken, the sequel goes backward, down the stairs, and straight into the trash. 

Review Courtesy of Sara Ciplickas 

Feature Image Credit to Warner Bros via IMD