Joker: Folie à Deux is the sequel to Todd Phillips's billion-dollar and Oscar winning 2019 hit, Joker. Much of the first film’s creative team has returned, with Phillips once again directing and co-writing with Scott Silver, and cinematographer Lawrence Sher, editor Jeff Growth, and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir all returning, too, never mind star Joaquin Phoenix reprising his role as loser fail-clown Arthur Fleck.
The result is a sequel that is remarkably consistent with its predecessor, at least visually. Like Joker before it, Folie à Deux has some nice visuals, and a decent score, though neither element is as fresh as they were in 2019. Now we’re on the other side of not only Joker, but also Matt Reeves’ more grounded aesthetic in The Batman, so Folie à Deux now looks like just one more wet version of Gotham City. Still, it’s a handsomely rendered wet version of Gotham.
Narratively, though, Folie à Deux is a desiccated corpse, starved of originality, creativity, and impulse. Whatever specialness Joker can lay claim to—it doesn’t appeal to me, but I recognize it works for a lot of people—is gone in Folie à Deux. It feels like a money grab, like any number of superhero sequels cashing in on a hit, repeating itself to bleed any spark out of the franchise. Even Phoenix’s performance feels like a retread; if it weren’t for the fact that he sings, his work in Folie à Deux feels like it could have been recycled from Joker. Thank gods for Lady Gaga, then, who does have a fresh take on Joker’s moll, Harleen “Lee” Quinzel. Far from feeling recycled, Gaga’s performance is textured and lived-in, like she reached deep to find something new and interesting to mine, justifying the name change by virtue of basically creating a new character.
Folie à Deux picks up a couple years after the events of Joker, with Arthur Fleck incarcerated within Arkham Asylum, awaiting trial. He’s bullied by the guards, led by the cheerfully cruel Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson), and his lawyer, Ms. Stewart (Catherine Keener), is mounting an insanity defense that demeans Arthur, which should play like an echo of his mother in the previous film, but does not. No one was putting that much effort into this script. While at Arkham, Arthur meets Lee Quinzel in music therapy, a pathological liar who obviously engineered their meeting. Again, if Folie à Deux was trying at all, Lee’s manipulations might lead to more than just another “kick Arthur while he’s down” moment, but once again, the story is devoid of effort.
Because he killed someone on national TV, Arthur’s case is less about guilt and more about staving off the death penalty, and if you think Phillips & Co. might have used this opportunity to offer some commentary, no matter how banal, on the penal state and institutionalized murder, abandon that thought right now. Where Joker at least pretends to be about something, Folie à Deux is completely hollow, a chocolate bunny of a film that offers nothing but surface appeal. There is nothing beyond the gloss, and even the gloss wears thin with a too-long runtime of 140 minutes. There simply is not enough story to fill over two hours, and no amount of singing can paper over the barely-there narrative.
Oh yes, Folie à Deux IS a musical—even worse, a jukebox musical—mining the American songbook, though there is an obligatory Best Original Song effort from Gaga. The many musical numbers are peppered between scenes ranging from bleak to boring, as if someone thought singing would make up for a lack of story. It doesn’t, though, it just means we’re treated to a parade of classics taking the place of character development and narrative momentum. They are at least performed well. Musical nerds might not like how raw Phoenix’s singing is, but it works within the carceral environs of Folie à Deux. It would be strange if he burst into song and sounded like a Disney prince, especially since Phoenix looks even more dragged backwards through a hedgerow in this film than he did in the first one. Arthur Fleck is not a man who can muster up robust vocals.
That’s a rare good decision in the film, though. The other good decision is opening the film with a Looney Tunes-style animated sequence loosely recapping Arthur’s public murder spree from Triplets of Bellville director Sylvain Chomet. Mostly, though, the film is an incredible assemblage of bad ideas, including a suggestion of sexual assault that is like Todd Phillips heard Zack Snyder when he said that Batman should get raped in prison and said, Now there’s an idea! Another bad idea is referencing Heath Ledger’s Joker, which no one asked for or wants. I thought the whole point of this exercise was to create a world this Joker could occupy by himself? I thought this wasn’t even really a comic book movie?
Cynical cash-grab comic book movies are nothing new, and Folie à Deux is just another example. It benefits from top notch craft and Lady Gaga’s performance, but it collapses under the weight of narrative indifference—I don’t have to like what your film is about, but please be about SOMETHING—and the same shallow nihilism that colored Joker. It’s not even interestingly bad, it’s just boring, with a surly teenager’s attitude that nothing means anything, man. A lot of work went into making a film that says nothing and means nothing and manages to overstay its welcome by an entire hour. Joker: Folie à Deux is a displeasing mix of maximum effort for minimum thought.
Joker: Folie à Deux is now playing exclusively in theaters.