Joker: Folie à Deux (2024, Phillips)
Frownland
Spoilers
Fully expected to hate this; turns out it was made specifically for people who hated the first one. Sat bemused and slightly irritated for the first forty minutes, feelings growing ever exacerbated by the minute following each howl from the Joker Head behind me, but when it reveals itself to be a stink bomb sneak attack—Pepé Le Pew makes a pointed appearance—and a literal litigation of the previous film, I warmed up to it. Let me be clear: Todd Phillips is a hack. No style, no rhythm, no touch with actors. (Phoenix offers diminishing returns here, and Gaga is given little to do other than serve as hypeman.) So rarely, however, do I see a movie made with such contempt from its creator, that my heart warms to see it. This makes sense: you have to have kind of a fucked up personality or dire gambling debt to return to material you hate--the last time I saw it happen on this scale was Sex and the City 2, a full fourteen years ago. I don’t like Phillips's work, and he strikes me as arrogant and out of touch (Shooting the cameras? Oy gevalt.), but in the case of Folie à Deux, he is innocent on most counts.
Guilty, guilty, guilty for poorly sublimating the movie musical, though. He should've left well enough alone, and might have gotten away with an actually successful work instead of merely an interesting one. Arguments are out there that these interludes function as points of emphasis for Phillips's critique of the blockbuster, but the film itself does not sufficiently argue the case that these digressions interrogate the form.
In short, it's a reheated Seinfeld series finale--take it or leave it. The Joker Head behind me, decidedly, left it. "I did not like that, I'll be downstairs," he asserted to no one in particular. That's the most good an insipid, mean-spirited, angry film director can do: dilute the Joker property, and, with a pinch of luck, undermine the superhero industrial complex writ large. Glad Phillips had the cajones to kill Joker--really didn't think he'd do it--but he should've given him the electric chair.
