[This review contains spoilers]
Last week saw the release of perhaps the most highly anticipated movie of 2024: Todd Philips' Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to his wildly successful 2019 film, Joker. Hype for the film began as soon as 2022 when it was announced that a sequel to Joker had been greenlit by DC, where Joaquin Phoenix would be reprising his Oscar-winning role and that Lady Gaga would star as Harley Quinn. Fans of the first film and the iconic pop star were already marking their calendars before the most shocking announcement of all came: This upcoming film would be...a musical?
Despite being an extremely divisive film, Joker ended up grossing over $1 billion dollars at the box office despite a budget of $50-70 million. A sequel was inevitable, and five years later, the second installment arrived in US theaters, after premiering at the Venice Film Festival a month earlier.
I have a complicated relationship with 2019's Joker. On one hand I think its a visually stunning film with some great performances, but I find its message and execution to be questionable at its best and dangerous at its worst. It makes the mistake of framing its main character, Arthur Fleck, as some kind of anti-hero, who is justified in his abhorrent behavior because of how he's been treated by society. Despite being the protagonist, it's not emphasized enough that the audience is not supposed to root for Arthur. And as a result, the film has accumulated a cult fanbase of people who idolize the character. In the sequel, Todd Philips plays with the idea of being plagued with his misunderstood creation.
Folie à Deux is at its core, a courtroom drama, where the audience follows the trial of Arthur Fleck, all while he has struck up a new romance with fellow inmate, Lee Quinzel. The film explores their hedonistic, brief relationship as the trial progresses. The musical aspect of the film largely comes from dream sequences or Arthur's delusions of grandeur, which almost makes them feel like a garish waste of time. Several times it feels as though the story is being put on pause just for an overly stylized musical number that goes nowhere. And there is a LOT of music in this film. There are about two dozen cover songs throughout the two hour long runtime. Unfortunately, a lot of these songs tend to drag, and there were multiple times in the cinema where the people around me muttered: "another one?" or "here we go again."
Despite only having been released for a few days, Folie à Deux has been absolutely lambasted by critics and fans alike. It currently holds an abysmal score of 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film has also struggled at the box office, seeing an opening weekend that grossed 60% less than the film's predecessor. Quite a bit of this criticism has revolved around Gaga, who has been promoting the film like crazy. A large majority of the film's marketing has relied on her inclusion as an actor, but she has significantly less screen time than audiences thought she would. Speaking of Gaga, she gives possibly the worst performance of her acting career so far. Despite the fact that she is playing Harley Quinn, "Lee" feels like an entirely new character. Her history as a psychiatrist is pretty much erased, and she just simply doesn't embody this character at all. In the past few years Gaga has proved her acting chops in film and television so this was a real disappointment, especially as a diehard fan of hers. Her album: "Harlequin" which serves as the film's musical companion piece has also been recieving mixed reviews from critics and fans since its release.
2019's Joker caught most of its backlash from its graphic violence, but there are only two real gory scenes in the movie, when Joker shoots Murray Franklin, and when he bashes his coworkers head into a wall. Folie à Deux on the other hand, has a scene that is more disturbing than both of those combined, and its barely even shown on screen. In the third act, before Arthur's final court hearing, he is taken into a bathroom by three correction officers, where they beat him, lie him on the ground, and it is implied that they rape him. The next day at his court hearing, Arthur has decided to drop his act as The Joker and chooses to portray himself in court as simply Arthur Fleck. Essentially, the Joker was raped out of him. Sexual Assault is sometimes used in writing to make the audience feel sympathy for a character, perhaps one that does not have a lot of redeeming qualities to begin with. In Folie à Deux, this is done in exceptionally poor taste. I guess it serves as Arthur's wake up call, but this was by far worse than anything the previous film had shown.
Upon my first watch of Folie à Deux, I described it as a "great time at the movies," and I still somewhat stand by that statement. Going to see the latest blockbuster with your friends is always a fun weekend activity, and this was an extremely entertaining film the first time around. But Folie à Deux is not a film that holds up after multiple watches.
With all that being said, the movie still does have some positive attributes. Namely, the cinematography by Lawrence Sher is easily the film's strongest aspect. What the film lacks in terms of writing, it makes up for in visuals. There were at least a dozen times I thought to myself: "what an incredible shot." I suppose that makes Folie à Deux another tried and true example of style-over-substance filmmaking.
I would describe the script of this movie as a block of marble, halfway to becoming a beautiful statue, but along the way, something went wrong. Folie à Deux had the potential to be a poignant, self-reflective piece about Todd Philips and his complicated relationship with the film that made him a household name. Lee Quinzel can be seen as the embodiment of all the psychotic fans that came from Joker. By the end of the film, Arthur has completely abandoned his Joker persona, finds Lee on the famous steps by where he used to live, but upon seeing her, she informs him that the fantasy is ruined and she no longer wants him. She leaves, Arthur returns to prison and is stabbed to death by some random inmate.
I don't mean to be a backseat writer, but if Lee was the one who killed Arthur, on those steps, it would have made the ending a thousand times better. It would have been the perfect visual metaphor for Todd Philips' creation being exploited and destroyed by the people who claimed to love it. Not to mention he would have died on the very steps where we first saw him in his iconic makeup and suit. Birth and death at the same place.
Considering how this film ends, and the underwhelming performance at the box office, it's quite possible that this will be the last installment of Todd Philips' Joker series. And in a lot of ways, that's probably for the best. Folie à Deux had a lot of potential to be one of this year's stand-outs in film, but due to a plethora of poor and at times baffling writing choices, it simply falls flat.
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