REVIEW: “Joker: Folie à Deux” – Todd Phillips’ Jukebox Musical Sequel Falls Flat

by Jacob Jones

Were one to inquire of the many, many people who went to see Todd Phillips’ Joker back when it premiered in 2019, one would most likely find a swath of largely binary responses, with a few notable variations. At the time it was either beloved or disliked, with little – if any – room for middle interpretation, and the public response bore that out. Between its billion dollar worldwide box office gross (it remains the only R-Rated film to pull that off) and its mixed critical reception, there was no movie released in 2019 as publicly divisive, nor one as unstoppable when it came to an awards season run. Garnering a whopping 10 Oscar nominations, 2 of which became wins, Todd Phillips’ origin tale of Arthur Fleck’s descent into madness stirred up so much buzz that theaters beefed up security in the event of possible shootings inspired by its titular character (thankfully, no such event occurred). As the years have come and gone, some opinions have shifted up or down, but most seem to have only become more entrenched. For myself, while I continue to flip back and forth on whether Joker is actually good or not, I find it to be an interesting experiment in the realm of comic book storytelling and a well-mounted – if not entirely novel – approach to adapting the Joker character for the screen. (The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver – its two main inspirations – are far better films.) All of this to say, with a billion dollar gross and a character that popular, a sequel was inevitable. But how were Phillips and company meant to pull off a comic book sequel to a film that was originally designed not to have any follow-ups at all? What possible angle was there left to use on a character whose cinematic history held no less than five different interpretations? Joker: Folie à Deux’s answer to this question should have been its saving grace. Instead, it may well be the film’s defining flaw.
 
Positioned as a jukebox musical – regardless of what the cast continues to deny about it on press tours – Joker: Folie à Deux picks up not long after Joker left off, with Arthur Fleck still in Arkham Asylum after two years, awaiting trial for the murder of the three New York subway accosters and television host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). While living amongst Gotham’s most notorious criminals and preparing his case with his lawyer, Arthur is invited to participate in a music class, where he meets Lee (Lady Gaga), and the two form a connection based on their shared madness, hence the film’s subtitle. Together, the pair engage in a whirlwind of various musical sequences across the film’s runtime as both prepare for the first-ever live broadcast of what is being dubbed “the trial of the century,” and civil support for Joker continues to grow ever stronger in the Gotham streets.
 
If you were to give me fourteen guesses as to where the Joker sequel would go back when it was first announced, “jukebox musical” would have never made the top forty-five guesses I had. Regardless, it was a bold move to turn what was more-or-less a Scorsese rip-off story into something no one has ever done at this scale before, and the addition of Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn to the mix is a genius bit of casting for this interpretation of those characters. That said, if the story synopsis above sounds too vague, it’s because, frankly, there’s not much of a story to Folie à Deux at all. In some manners of speaking, it is in fact the antithesis of its predecessor – boring, drawn out, repetitive, and thematically murky, to the point where the addition of the musical sequences become not a fresh new angle by which to push the story forward, but the main thing sapping it of any real energy or narrative momentum. Each time a character breaks out into song, which – unlike most musicals – just happens for the sake of happening, regardless of how little sense it makes narratively, the movie stops dead in its tracks, and this happens over and over and over again. The music is decently performed, and there are one or two numbers that are genuine hits in terms of how they’re mounted, designed, etc, but they do nothing to advance what little story there is. By the time these sequences roll around, the story is already where it was going to end up anyway, and the music more or less only reminds the viewer what we’re already watching happen, without deepening its meaning or offering any greater weight to the performances.
 
The introduction of Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn – as stated – is a genius bit of casting, and she does what she’s able to, excelling particularly in the film’s musical moments, but the script offers her little to chew on in terms of her relationship to Arthur, making her seem like more of a crazed fan than a devoted fellow psychopath. There are some greater specifics to that idea that I won’t spoil here, but suffice it to say, she doesn’t get a lot of interesting things to do, and the character is too underdeveloped for what the script asks of her. As for Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, he’s given less grimy material to chew on, which leads his performance to run more or less the same lines as his pre-Joker personality in the last film. Luckily, he’s still quite talented – even a little more interesting as a character – in that bit of the last film, so even when the film’s not working, he is working within the confines he has.
 
The unfortunate side effect of a movie like Joker, when a sequel is greenlit, is that all the worst defenders of it as some masterwork of comic book storytelling are hoping for the least interesting approach to the follow-up. In that manner, I can absolutely understand what Todd Phillips and company set out to do when crafting a narrative that investigates not only whether the Joker character is in fact a sympathetic figure in this universe, but whether the decision to mount the character in that way previously was ever a good idea, an idea Folie à Deux confronts directly. Unfortunately, this angle just didn’t work. The storytelling is repetitive, the narrative is disengaging, and even the small surprises the film has in store are too little, too late to fix what’s broken here.
 
I’m giving “Joker: Folie à Deux” a 4.2/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan