I didn’t expect there to be a scene in the newly released Joker: Folie à Deux – after the weird but nostalgic Looney Tunes style opening - where the great Brendan Gleeson, (who’s playing an Irish prison warden at the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane), belts out a tune during a prison singing group...
To be fair to Gleeson he is pretty good and it’s a very funny scene, nicely executed by writer and director Todd Philips. But that is where the singing should have stopped rather continued on...and on for the next two hours and 20 minutes.
I’m not sure what I wanted from the sequel to the Oscar winning triumph that was 2019′s Joker but Joaquin Phoenix delivering half his lines through the medium of song was not it.
It could be argued that the emphasis on music mostly stems for the casting of Grammy Award-winner Lady Gaga playing the deranged love interest Lee Quinzel.
Although Gaga proved in 2018′s A Star is Born that she can balance a serious performance with her singing abilities this is not something that we really get a chance to see in Folie à Deux.
Instead of allowing the music to be treated as a dialogue that moves the plot along both Gaga and Phoenix spend a large chunk of the film simply trading warbly excerpt after warbly excerpt from the Great American Songbook.
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered? No. Bored? Yes - very.
Much like the original the sequel is visually stunning and Phoenix sinks back into his leading role with ease, clearly having to undergo what I can only imagine was a brutal dietary regime in order to appear “malnourished and thin and hungry”. But, despite the obvious efforts to make the film look and feel stylish and edgy the story itself feels safe.
Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is serving his time in Arkham, he meets Lee they fall ‘in love’ - at least for a little while, then he goes on trial for the five, (or was it six?), murders he committed in the first film and that’s about the height of it.
Combined with a soundtrack that’s about as pleasant as someone dragging their nails down a chalkboard and it makes for quite a tedious and uncomfortable watch.
It just doesn’t feel like enough. We’ve seen sad, bad and mad clown tropes in countless films before and Folie à Deux has precious little to add.
Joker was originally supposed to be a standalone film and I think it should have been. The sequel might have been ambitious and superficially outrageous, but at heart it’s overly cautious. Some have argued that it’s a cutting social commentary on class warfare and mental illness and although that might have been the intention, to me it was simply two hours and 20 minutes of pretentious nonsense.
Thus, it joins the exhaustive list of ill-advised/conceived/executed sequels such as Speed 2, Exorcist II, Grown Ups 2 and of course, Mean Girls 2… some things are just better left alone.
