Joker: Folie à Deux review

    Is the Joker: Folie à Deux bad?

    Yes.

    Yes, it is.

    Is it a worthy follow up to the themes of Joker?

    No, not really.

    This is going to be a rather personal review but I've suffered mental issues for much of my life. I'm not going to get into the specifics of them but I had quite a few of them growing up. I had epilepsy for my youth, high functioning autism for adulthood, plus several diagnoses for other issues that range from...oh wait, I said I wasn't going to get into specifics. I was on a lot of medications and very much someone treated "weird" by society. That's because I am weird and proud of it. It's all y'all neurotypical folk who are the strange ones!

    The Joker film by Todd Phillips tries to take Arthur Fleck, mass murderer, and make him a sympathetic character. Perhaps it was deliberate or perhaps it was accidentally correct but he did a pretty good job in the original movie. Arthur Fleck is mentally ill, low grade schizophrenia and depression as an amateur diagnosis, but that's not why he becomes a shooter. 

    One of the things I hate in America is whenever someone does go do some horrifying atrocity, they attempt to blame it on mental health in America. This is just cover, of course, and they do less about mental health in America than they do about gun control but it's also complete horseshit anyway. Mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence than they are ever likely to be perpetrators (John Hinckley Junior aside) and the majority of spree killers are driven by ideology or a desire to commit suicide by cop. Hate is not a sign of insanity.

    The first movie has Arthur driven to become a killer by a combination of parental abuse, financial distress, class warfare, and a desire to become famous. Society rewards Arthur Fleck with fame and attention only when he becomes a murderer. It is better to be feared than loved but Machiavelli said it was best to be both and the Joker persona allowed Fleck to become a national celebrity through his crimes. It's not a premise that tracks 1:1 with reality but as a Scorsese homage to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy as much as Batman, it worked.

    Joker: Folie à Deux doesn't work in the slightest. It also more or less abandons the idea that society transformed Arthur Fleck into the Joker by rewarding his worst behavior than, "Oh, yeah, he really was crazy all along and that's why he did what he did." It also doesn't remotely make use of Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn (or "Lee" here) in either her acting, singing, or general weirdness. She's a character that could have been portrayed by anyone and the work suffers for her absence. Arthur never goes on to be the Joker and spends virtually the entirety of the movie in court or dream sequences where neither of the primary actors are allowed to sing well. Lady Gaga made an entire soundtrack for the movie and they didn't use it. What a waste.

    Essentially, the movie reverts all of Arthur's character development from the previous movie and infantalizes him by trying to make it so he isn't responsible for his worst deeds. No, Arthur is a multiple murderer and fully responsible for that. Society may have broken him but he's the guy who thought being a famous murderer was better than being a disgraced nobody. You don't get to walk that back. Indeed, the movie offends me by basically inverting the movie's message about society's treatment of the mentally ill as it requires Arthur being abused worse to get him to acknowledge the Joker was a bad idea. Yeah, abuse doesn't make people better regardless of what people think about prisons.

    In short, this movie sucks and just isn't fun nor informative. It also doesn't work as a sequel or an expansion on the characters of the first one. My own biases make its statements on what the mentally ill "need" incline me to hate it but the fact is that it would be bad even if it wasn't spouting nonsense. People wanted a movie about the Joker who commits crimes for the attention. They wanted a Bonnie and Clyde or Natural Born Killers. What they got was Chicago with crappier music.

4/10