Joker: folie a deux * * ½

Joker and Harley, caught in a bad romance.

I never shared the unbridled enthusiasm that some folks had for the first Joker but I thought it was okay with a lot of potential; so I was looking forward to being impressed by the sequel. Unfortunately the opposite has happened.

It feels like they gave the project to another writer and director who stuffed it up, but that's not the case. It's Todd Phillips again, so I'm not sure how things could have gone so wrong. Perhaps he thought the Joker created in the last film is so wickedly charismatic his presence alone should do the job?

In the first Joker we are made to sympathise - even empathise.  We don't feel much for him in this film.  Well, at least I didn't.  He's just uninterestingly nuts and often very nasty - both his Joker persona and his Arthur Fleck persona.  

It's mostly interiors and  mostly set in a prison, where he has been incarcerated after killing all those people in the last film. His trial is coming up and his lawyer is pretty sure she can get his sentence commuted by proving he is insane.  

The prison guards are all stereotype Irish immigrants. One of them (Brendan Gleeson) likes musicals and genuinely tries to help Joker by getting him into a musical which is being put on by a less secure block of prisoners.  It is there that he meets and falls in love with Harley Quinn (Lady Ga Ga).  She's criminally insane too.  She likes to set buildings on fire.  She knows of Jokers reputation and is besotted with him in a rock star kind of way.

As none of the popular songs were written for the film, I wouldn't really call Joker:folie a deux a musical in the traditional sense, even though there are a couple of scenes that give us a fanciful dream sequence like a 1940's musical.  Lady Ga Ga is good as always (what a voice!)   And Joaquim Phoenix commits himself and works hard, but it still doesn't give you much to take home.  Story wise there is not much here. We feel like were just waiting for him to go to trial. There is an attempted breakout with Harley that is quickly thwarted but not much else. 

The trial scenes are kind of funny and kind of ugly as Joker/Arthur Fleck chooses to represent himself and both characters come out.  I can see where they are going with it as the makeup is wiped off, but it is uninvolving and flat, even if they surprise us with a shocking twist in the courtroom that comes from a source other than Joker. 

The ending is a bit flat too.  Unexpected sure, but you feel like the critical moment has been hijacked by a virtual unknown. Maybe that's the point. Fair enough, but even if it is, it doesn't work well.