Warner Bros (2024)
The 2019 film Joker was absolutely brilliant, so I was looking forward to seeing the continuation of the story. Sadly, we didn't get too much in the way of a story with Joker: Folie à Deux; a sequel that is every bit as pretentious as the title suggests.
The film begins with an animated short called Me And My Shadow, which I found to be the most creative and entertaining part of Joker: Folie à Deux. It felt like an homage to the outstanding Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond cartoons that aired throughout the 90's and early 2000's, and it set up what I hoped would be a surreal psychological thriller in which the filmmakers dive deeper into the Arthur Fleck character.
It wouldn't be fair to say this is a bad movie, but it's extremely disappointing. The art of leaving the audience wanting more is a balancing act. If done right, you end up with a fanbase that's chomping at the bit to see the next story that you have to tell. If done wrong, it leaves the audience feeling cheated and bored. Unfortunately, this was a case of the latter, or at least it was for me.
Joker: Folie à Deux felt like a screenplay for a half hour episode for a courtroom/prison drama television series. That screenplay was padded out with musical numbers that seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever other than to justify the casting of Lady Gaga as Harleen Quinzel and to pad out the runtime to 138 minutes.
I'm not completely opposed to the idea of making the sequel to Joker a musical, but the way in which it was done was flat out boring. The musical scenes didn't really add much of anything to the story, and rather than use original songs or established songs that were interesting, we got high school glee club material of songs like When The Saints Go Marching In, I’ve Got The World On A String, and When You're Smiling. It felt to me like the director was a big fan of the Singin' In The Rain scene from A Clockwork Orange and thought "let's do that, but we'll keep doing it over and over again". I'm guessing that they thought they were achieving an eerie vibe, or to evoke the feelings of a dark and psychotic romance, but the end result just felt dull. By the halfway point of the film when it became obvious that another song was coming, all I could think was "oh god, she's going to sing again", and whatever small momentum they managed to build up in the preceding minutes grinded to a halt.
I'm sure there will be folks out there who will enjoy this. If that's you, hey... more power to you. I won't ever try to convince someone that they're wrong for finding joy in something that didn't speak to me. However, this is a film that I really wouldn't recommend to anybody. It's not good enough to be interesting. It's not bad enough to be worth watching just to see how bad it can be. It's just boring, and that's the last thing I wanted or expected a sequel to the phenomenal 2019 film to be.
