THERE’S a moment fairly early on in the newly released Joker: Folie à Deux – after the weird but nostalgic Looney Tunes style opening - that sees the great Brendan Gleeson, playing an Irish prison warden at the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, break into song at a prison singing group.
The camera is actually focused on Joaquin Phoenix at the time, as it is for so much of this tediously long film, but behind we can hear big, bluff Warden Sullivan (Gleeson) turning out to be a pretty good crooner.
It’s a very funny scene, nicely executed by writer and director Todd Philips, and I won’t be alone in finding my mind briefly drifting off in the happy direction of Gleeson’s performance as ‘Knuckles’ McGinty in Paddington 2. But it’s a moment that falls progressively flatter over the next couple of hours as the songs keep coming… and coming.
I’m not sure what I expected from the sequel to the dark triumph that was 2019′s Joker but Joker: The Musical 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, but I was quite bored.
Don’t get me wrong - visually the film is stunning, and Phoenix’s characteristically intense central performance is terrific. But, following on directly from the murderous events of Joker, this is such a thin second instalment of a seemingly interminable origin story.
Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is miserable in Arkham, cheers up briefly when he meets the mercurial Lee, and then goes on trial for the five, or was it six, murders he committed first time around. And that’s it.
Combine with a ponderously slow pace and no mention of Batman at all… well, it certainly explains why there is so much time for singing.
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. ‘That’s Entertainment’ sings Gaga… ha, if only.
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.
