It has been amusing to observe Joaquin Phoenix, Woman Gaga and director / co-writer Todd Phillips step-ball-change their means by means of their haphazardly choreographed chickenshitting about whether or not their new movie, Joker: Folie à Deux, is a musical. (Spoiler alert: It’s.) The priority, in fact, is that musicals are sometimes a tricky box-office promote and doubly so to disaffected incels that pushed 2019’s Joker previous $1 billion worldwide and whom Warner Brothers want to return for spherical two. On the identical time, Phillips’ excessive diploma of issue for “comic-book musical” might maybe court docket crucial appreciation from those that discovered Joker overrated and underwhelming.
What this trio ought to have been cagey about is how rather more monumentally boring and primary Folie à Deux is than the unique — which was itself content material to easily drop Joker right into a clearly R-rated narrative for the primary time. If music, as Folie à Deux suggests, makes us complete and balances our conflicting forces, the singing setpieces right here make the movie a complete lot of nothing and steadiness the conflicting forces of whose expertise Phillips has extra deeply wasted: Phoenix and his innate inspiration to research new facets of a reprised position as Arthur Fleck (aka Joker) or Gaga (who portrays Joker’s love, Harleen “Harley Quinn” Quinzel), who proved she might do excess of merely sing her ass off in A Star is Born.
Though the movie ostensibly follows Arthur’s trial for the murders he dedicated within the first movie, Folie à Deux extra ceaselessly depicts the titular shared delusions from Arthur and his newfound paramour, “Lee” (as she prefers to be referred to as), as musical numbers. This lineup contains requirements by Harold Arlen, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David, amongst others, and so they unspool on units that span every little thing from precipitous rooftops and darkish piano bars to brightly lit prime-time TV units and dingy jail commons.
Staged by Phillips with little creativeness and edited by Jeff Groth with even much less oomph, these sequences sometimes really feel like a Grate American Songbook — crutches on which the movie leans to assist fairly limp character growth and blasts of massive, brassy encompass sound certain to awaken slumbering audiences. The customarily purposefully dour preparations really feel like watching a complete movie stuffed with pleased songs paradoxically, and laughably, inverted into minor keys for intense trailers. Solely Gaga’s recalibration of “Near You” right into a stalker-ish torch tune and Phoenix’s courtroom eruption of Bricusse & Newley’s “The Joker” stand out. In any other case, the musical parts play just like the fanciful interludes from Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King with none aptitude. Certainly, the “gonna construct a mountain from somewhat hill” chorus from the oft-quoted “Gonna Construct a Mountain” appears to be the mandate for a movie of minimal incident and reasonably maximal size.
There may be at the very least occasional stress to the counterpoint of Lee’s insulation from hazard and Arthur’s isolation inside it, and Phoenix is at his most electrifying reverse a personality who returns from the primary movie for an surprising courtroom confrontation. (This scene additionally serves as an appreciated corrective to the way during which this character was merely a punchline earlier than.) Nevertheless, Folie à Deux too typically lets its characters dance across the parquet dance ground of a smoky membership than any type of lit fuse about to blow up between them.
An animated prelude establishes the central query: Is the Joker merely a chaotic character that the long-abused Arthur has erected as psychological armor and which he can blame for the murders in an madness protection … or is Joker only a common entrance for Arthur’s eagerness to attach with somebody, anybody? Throughout certainly one of his many lengthy, loud marches by means of Arkham State Hospital as he awaits trial, Arthur catches a glimpse of Lee throughout a bunch singalong in a minimum-security wing. Officer Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) is among the many guards with whom Arthur trades cigarettes for jokes, and the kindly but agency Sullivan secures Arthur a spot in that group. Arthur’s habits has been good, in any case, and it’s additionally a means for Sullivan to screw round for a number of hours with out really having to work.
Lee has wound up at Arkham for setting hearth to her mother and father’ condominium constructing. Or so she says. She grew up in the identical neighborhood as Arthur. Or so she says. She survived abuse, too. Or … you get the image. Arthur and Lee’s immediately amorous ardor spills over into the media-circus atmosphere of his trial, which is basically leeched of life for anybody besides audiences who’ve lengthy waited to see Gotham golden boy Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) attempting a case at size on a large display. Arthur might have discovered a purpose to stay. Nevertheless, proving it would solely give Gotham a purpose to make sure he dies. And is Lee actually in love with Arthur or simply the violently brash Joker?
By trial’s finish, Arthur makes a number of selections of appreciable consequence. But it surely’s actually outstanding, in a movie of such bloated size, that there’s virtually no arc for him to observe and arrive at these selections. Most of them simply merely occur out of nowhere. No less than Arthur had a discernible path within the first movie, even when it was merely transposed from Travis Bickle.
At 138 minutes, the movie might use extra scenes between Sullivan and Arthur teasing out their tentative dynamic or between Lee and Arthur that aren’t merely one other disjointed soundtrack cue. By the point it arrives at an insultingly dopey and bro-ish decision that evokes a Say Something … line from behind the Fuel ‘n’ Sip solely with out the satirical punchline, Joker: Folie à Deux cements itself as each musical and misfire, with nothing bewitching, bothering or bewildering about it.