By Trudi-Rose Edwards
Back in the pre-Covid world of 2019, my sister and I went to a cinema in Harrow to watch Joker. There had been a bit of buzz around the film; Joaquin Phoenix was starring in it; it wasn’t going to be like all the other DC and Marvel movies that were oversaturating the market; initial reviews were positive. For me, it was the fact that the ticket prices in Harrow seemingly hadn’t risen since 2003, £5 meant I’d be very forgiving.
In the end, Joker was great. It was moody, Scorsese-like, “not like other villain stories” and Phoenix’s understated, slow descent into true madness performance won him his (overdue) Oscar.
Cut to 2024 and the much-anticipated sequel Joker Folie à Deux is here. Phoenix’s Joker aka Arthur Fleck is back! Director Todd Phillips returns! Lady Gaga joins the cast! The trailer alone promises ‘the trial of the century’, more maniacal laughter from Phoenix, Gotham prison, music, romance, dance sequences (because, naturally, this sequel is a musical) – and let me tell you this: the two-and-a-half-minute trailer is by far the best thing about this diabolically poor movie.
It being a musical isn’t the problem – Joker was always about being different, unlike all the formulaic superhero and villain movies out there. And besides, why else would you cast pop sensation Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn? Not for her acting surely, which is one-dimensional at best.
Except, the singing throughout is…bad. And not in an Emma-Watson-autotuned kind of way. Bad as in this-is-awful-make-it-stop kind of way. Phoenix and Gaga adopt their best (worst) wispy, fragile, slightly tuneless vocals for every single song they sing (and goodness, there are so many songs!). There are no powerhouse vocals and the near-constant musical numbers, many of which are fantasies, do next to nothing to move the plot forward. Joker Folie à Deux manages to take classic standards and all timey favourites (how many reprises of That’s Entertainment does a film need?!) and completely butcher them (give me the Simpsons version of Close to You any day).
Even if you look beyond the musical aspects, Joker Folie à Deux has very little to write home about. The plot is wafer-thin: Arthur Fleck is about to stand trial for the crimes he committed in the first film. He meets Gaga’s character somewhere towards the beginning of this seemingly endless film, they share a few lines of dialogue and are suddenly madly in love. There. That’s it. That’s the plot.
The performances have about as much depth. Phoenix – a great actor – is completely wasted in the role, spending most of the time walking around looking sad and sickly. In Joker, Arthur was a complicated character that was able to gain some sympathy. But in this sequel any and all redeeming qualities are non-existent.
He and Gaga have as much chemistry as a vacuum, albeit not helped by the lacklustre script. If I wanted to watch Lady Gaga sing at the piano whilst a 49-year-old man awkwardly watches on I’d watch her and Bradley Cooper’s performance at the Oscars.
Brendan Gleeson and Steve Coogan(!) also make appearances, the former possibly being the most authentic performance in the whole movie…the latter, well.
As I left the theatre from watching Joker Folie à Deux I heard one guy mutter “they should never have made this film.”
On that point I disagree, because despite the one-note performances, vapid plot, soul destroyingly bad musical set pieces and sheer pointlessness of this film, it absolutely should have been made – purely so that nobody will ever try and make a film this bad again.
Go watch Walk the Line
Go watch A Star is Born
Go watch Joker
Go watch paint dry.
That’s entertainment.