Joker: Folie à Deux is a 2024 American jukebox musical psychological thriller film directed by Todd Phillips from a screenplay he co-wrote with Scott Silver. Loosely based on DC Comics characters, it is a sequel to Joker (2019). Joaquin Phoenix reprises his role as the Joker, with Lady Gaga as his love interest, Harley Quinzel, Zazie Olivia Beetz and Leigh Gill also reprise their roles, while Brendan Gleeson, Catherine keener, Steve Coogan join the cast. It is produced by Warner Bros. Pictures in association with Joint Effort and was distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures–from Wikipedia

I would like to preface this review by saying, I am a big fan of the first Joker movie. It left a massive impression on me the first time I watched it. Me and my dad were taken back and amazed at what we had just seen. We couldn’t stop talking about the film. The violence felt so real and shocking that it was one of the scariest movies I had ever seen but it also had an amazing main character Arthur Fleck as we see him slowly lose his sanity throughout the film.

So when they announced a sequel to Joker, me and my dad were ecstatic about it, but when we heard about the bad reviews and it being a musical/courtroom drama, we were worried about the direction it was going in so we didn’t go to the movie theater to watch it. Instead we rented it on cable TV.

The movie started with a terrible animated cartoon and I didn’t like it from the beginning. I thought I was watching a Saturday Night Live movie parody. I didn’t think I would watch the right film but the sad part is I was. And after it was done, the next scene is Arthur Fleck in prison. And after a couple of minutes, he started singing, bringing me to one of my main problems with the movie. The songs do not enhance or compliment the story. They feel like commercial breaks for the film and what is happening in the songs doesn’t affect what’s going on in the character’s life. Another big issue with this film is most of the run time is spent in jail or a courtroom with no excitement or intrigue.

Joaquin Phoenix is giving the movie all he has but not even he can save this train wreck. The main love interests Arthur Fleck and Harley Quinn have no chemistry between them. He just sees her while walking in a hallway and they instantly have a strange connection. The prison guards’ relationship with Arthur Fleck is interesting because they are nice to him sometimes and other times they are very mean to him. One of the best scenes in the film is when Leigh Gill’s character Gary Puddles testifies against Arthur Fleck. It’s generally a very emotional scene and Joaquin Phoenix and Leigh Gill really put on a great performance. Every other character is just unmemorable or not interesting.

This film has a ton of different ideas that are thrown together out of desperation to make a sequel to a billion-dollar film but none of them come together for a cohesive vision, the individual ideas don’t even add one or two appealing parts to this movie, it’s just something that exists that never in the two-hour runtime justifies its existence. The first film very clearly had certain things that it was exploring. It explores society and its attitude towards the mentally ill and how psychopaths are created from nature or nurture or lack thereof. Clearly you get into this movie and the entire film really just functions as a two-hour epilogue to the first film and it doesn’t have anything new or interesting to say that wasn’t already conveyed much better in the first film. The main star of Joker: Folie a Deux is the Joker film from 2019. It just constantly references itself and points towards previous scenes. The courtroom scene of this film is riddled with one after another of returning cast members from the first film reconveying to the audience the events that we already know and then moving on to the next person. It has nothing to say or to add to these characters or this movie.

First of all, I feel like story-wise there isn’t much interesting going on in this film. I literally couldn’t wait for it to end because it was just seemingly going nowhere.

Something that really frustrated me about this film was an element of the original Joker that I thought they showcased brilliantly. They were able to walk a tightrope between reality and psychedelic fantasy. There were a number of sequences in that first film where you really didn’t know whether you were seeing reality or you were seeing some kind of fabrication of reality. The way the movie ends you could really reframe the entire film as a psychotic fantasy in his head. It was very ambiguous and open-ended, and I loved that about it. That was one of my main concerns, are you going to destroy that ambiguity or are you going to choose one path and ruin that big question mark that was left at the end of that first film? They kind of do this but the most frustrating thing about the movie is they try to continue that element of many different things namely the musical sequences that are supposed to be their psychotic fantasies but there are a number of other just straightforward narrative sequences that feel absolutely fantastical because of just the logic of what is happening and yet later on in the film when there’s nothing that really points towards those more fantastical sequences as if they actually happened. It just makes that entire movie very confusing. So many things that felt like he is imagining or fabricating everything in his head and by the end of the movie it feels like it happened, which makes no sense.

I didn’t like the end of the movie. I don’t want to tell you what happens but let’s just say they tried to shock you in the final scene.

Overall besides looking nice and a couple of good scenes Joker: Folie à Deux is the dumpster fire of a movie. It’s boring, dull, and it didn’t have anything new to say, the Joker and Harley Quinn relationship just didn’t work. Choosing to make this movie a musical and a courtroom drama is a decision that I would never think would be a good idea. Todd Phillips, what were you thinking when you were making this film?

I’m giving Joker: Folie à Deux a 0.5/10. This is one of the worst movies I have the displeasure of viewing. I don’t recommend this movie to anyone especially if you are a big fan of the first Joker movie, take my advice and just avoid it. It will ruin the first Joker movie.