This review contains spoilers and covers sensitive topics that occur in the movie.
The 1993-94 Houston Rockets won their first ever NBA championship. In an era dominated by the likes of Michael, Magic, and Larry, the Texas-based team had struggled to bring home any silver, but Jordan’s unlikely retirement resulted in the Hakeem-led squad lifting their first Larry O’Brien trophy. With MJ still out of the league, Houston was favored to repeat their fate in the upcoming year, but complacency and inconsistency in the regular season led them finishing only 6th in the Western Conference. No team below a 4-seed had ever won the NBA championship, so a 6-seed Rockets team thought their season was over. However, due to standout individual performances and better team camraderie led to a repeat championship for Houston.
Now imagine if the follow-up after a legendary run wasn’t a small setback with an ultimately happy ending. Imagine the Rockets, months after winning their first ever NBA championship, finished 15th in the conference. Imagine they actually straight up won 0 games. Imagine if despite Hakeem Olajuwon averaging 50, 15, and 10, the Rockets still finished dead last in points scored. Imagine if half the players quit halfway through the season and also the city of Houston got hit by 7 different natural disasters leading to the ultimate demise of the Houston Rockets.
This is an allegory for the abomination that is Joker: Folie à Deux. Joker (2019) was a fantastic movie. DC, after playing second fiddle to Marvel, had found success with the likes of Joker and The Batman by taking on a more realistic and dark tone. I guess the primary emotion I feel about Deux is… why? How? What? Why was this movie even made? Joker was always supposed to be a one-off film. Joaquin Phoenix stated that he would not come back for a sequel unless the script was perfect. This was one of the worst scripts I have ever experienced. How could the same team behind Joker (2019) even come up with this abomination?
I’ll start with the (few) positives. Joaquin Phoenix is great. His performance is on par with the first film. However, the gap between Phoenix’s performance and the general direction of the movie is so immense that it almost feels uncomfortable watching Phoenix — like an amateur film student has coerced an actual crazy person to play a lead in their shitty college project. Lady Gaga does well too, although her character is so poorly written that it’s hard to genuinely rave about her performance. The cinematography is also compelling at times in this movie but its laughably bad at other points.
It’s time to address the elephant in the room — the fact that this movie is a musical. It really did not need to be a musical. I’ve seen takes online that the music was used to somehow “distract” the audience from the fact that the plot was so scattered. But surely this cannot be true. If I, after the previous sentence, told you go listen to 1 by nate sib, and then my next paragraph was reviewing Megalopolis instead, the music would not be some cover-up for this awful sharp change in this direction. It just leaves the viewer with an unnecessary musical sequence AND a terrible continuation to the story. Possibly the most offensive part of this “musical” is the musical sequences themselves. The music is not good. 80% of all musical lines delivered in this film and whispered, over music that is not loud enough, mixed awkwardly to depict some middle child between talking and singing. All but maybe 1 or 2 musical sequences were completely useless and detrimental to the overall movie.
The plot is also… atrocious. As many have said, Deux completely backtracks on the foundations of 2019 — a movie great because Arthur Fleck is shown to genuinely be someone who is mentally unstable due to a tortured upbringing who falls in love with the idea of being an agent of chaos simply due to the newfound validation, using murder as a necessary vessel to aid his fantasy. It is uncomfortably addictive to watch because he is scary, he is unhinged, and worst of all he is realistic. Deux portrays Fleck as a completely innocent and unfortunate man that we should feel complete sympathy for because the Joker is actually an alternate personality due to his childhood abuse (at least I think this is the desired sentiment but the motif is so poorly told that I have no idea if this is meant to be accepted or rejected by the audience). The absolute pinnacle of this abomination is when Deux briefly mentions that Fleck’s mother’s boyfriends severly sexually assaulted him, leading to his evil split personality. 2019 outlines only physical abuse and never even hints at a split personality situation. It has always been a descent to madness, not a split personality. Then, after this new revelation based on no new evidence or plot points, the prison guads proceed to sexually assault Fleck after an outburst, which then permanently elimates his desires to be the Joker. In other words, they rape the Joker out of him. This development is lazy, crude, ineffective, and simply bastardizes the movie to a point where any little admiration the viewer had for the movie till this point is immediately lost.
If that wasn’t already bad enough, the only somewhat compelling part of this movie, the courtroom drama, is abruptly ended by an explosion caused by wannabe Joker cosplayers. It literally feels like an intrusive thought made it into the script then onto the camera. I feel that initially the movie wanted to cover the Joker dealing with the rammifications of his actions, seeing the massive scale destruction caused by his admirers, but the plot pivoted yet they retained the climax that makes absolutely no sense here. After some Twoface fanservice and the Joker being rejected by Harley Quinn, he is put back into prison. He is then set up by some prison guards, and stabbed to death by another prisoner, who is shown to carve a smile into his face… symbolizing that Fleck was never the “real Joker”.
I’m too sick of this movie to write a full-fledged conclusion.
TL;DR: Plot, music, and overall movie are bad — not in a “so bad that’s good” way. More like it’s so bad it’s an offensive waste of time way.