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Rob Reviews "Joker: Foile a Deux"

Writer's picture: Rob ErvinRob Ervin

Todd Phillips is a guy who perplexes me.  The writer-director started strong out of the gate with films like Road Trip (say what you want, but it’s still in the pop culture landscape), Old School, and the Hangover films.  I even enjoyed his take on Starsky & Hutch with Snoop Dogg having one of my favorite lines of dialog with someone saying, “You know a lot about golf” and him responding as Huggy Bear with “I know a lot more about grass”.  However, his last two films have left me in a place that I just don’t want to be in.

 

Joker was the only film I have seen as long as I can remember that I almost walked out of.  It was one of those cases where you could have called that anything else and its portrait of a man descending into madness I would have held in much higher regard.  Unfortunately, by leaving “the” off of the title, it was like Phillips decided he was going to do whatever he wanted to the mythos of a character that I have always believed to not need an origin (not even in that horrible way that Tim Burton tried to do it; I’m still kinda salty about that thirty-five years later), and it just seemed scatter-shot and executed badly.  But it made over a billion dollars worldwide, so five years later we get Joker: Folie à Deux.

 

Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is serving his prison term for the five people he murdered, with his lawyer (Catherine Keener) working towards an insanity plea.  He has become somewhat of a cult figure, which gets the attention of fellow inmate Lee (Lady Gaga).  As they grow closer, the media circus around Fleck’s trial approaches a fever pitch taking the expected amounts of twists and turns.

 

And it’s a musical.  And it’s the better part of two hours and fifteen minutes long.

 

I cannot lie here: I enjoyed this one more than the first, but with a bar that low it’s not hard to beat.  I don’t care if you take an article off of someone’s name: you are still trying to tell the story of a character that really doesn’t need it.  Gaga as she-who-may-or-may-not-be-Harley-Quinn (which is the case with every character in what is being labeled as an “Elseworlds” tale, and that seems like a stretch too) is always good, but her character’s affect on Fleck is contrary to the dynamic between the two that has been well established over the last three decades.  As we see Fleck for the second film in a row, there is nothing that leads me to believe he is the criminal mastermind that he is perceived to represent, and it just kept me shaking my head throughout Joker: Folie à Deux. 

 

I can say that this film excels in the performances, visual, and costuming departments alone, but that is where the positives end for me.  There is no point here, there is no real plot to speak of (even for a musical), and it just plods along at the pace of a turtle on an oil slick.  Looking at my current film list for the year, I have definitely seen worse this year (especially within genre), and this one will surprisingly not sit in the bottom ten mathematically.  There is no reason for me to recommend this outside of the “art is subjective” crowd, which it seems to be made for.  When I was asked afterwards by a friend how it was, I simply replied with “it… was”.  And as a wise man once said: that’s what I have to say about that.

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