Director: Todd Phillips Screenwriter: Scott Silver, Todd Phillips Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures Running Time: 138 min. MPAA: R

I didn’t enjoy Todd Phillips’s first Joker movie because it was a meandering mess of ideas. The revisionist 1980s tale of the Batman villain was smeared with so much postmodern grime to cover up how empty its commentary was on mental health and the class divide. You could at least tilt your head and squint to see a more profound movie to appreciate Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. But I’d have to twist myself into a pretzel to find anything profound within the sequel, Folie à Deux. It’s just as unfocused as the past film and even more thematically hollow, where that edgy glaze isn’t thick enough to cover up the cracks this time.

Far more potential is wasted here, where Phillips seems to want to critique the previous film, but also lavish in the absurd amount of freedom with this project. Phoenix returns as Arthur Fleck, the man who took on the role of Joker and was arrested for shooting a talk show host. Now, in a mental institution, he has to face trial for his crimes, where the characters of the past film are trotted out to make their case against Arthur. Although Arthur is broken by prison, his old Joker self is revived with the presence of Lee Quinzel, another inmate played by Lady Gaga. Playing to Gaga’s singing strengths, Lee acts as more of a siren for Arthur to return to the madness he started. She instigates and lies so that the clown can come out and entertain the rebelliously disenfranchised that worship at the alter of Joker, casting a spell on Arthur’s psyche that evokes fantasies of jukebox musical numbers.

In the film’s attempt to juggle courtroom drama and musical sequences, there’s a jarring effect to it all. It rarely feels like anything is building between these two clashing dynamics. Sure, Arthur’s fantasies amount to revenge on his foes and his love for Lee, but they’re all scattershot in their stagings that range from Broadway sets to 1970s variety shows, hitting random on the jukebox to cover show tunes, 60s pop, and gospel. The courtroom scenes do interrogate Arthur’s past actions, but often get lost as Arthur’s mind pollutes the proceedings with distracting thoughts of the first movie or Phoenix putting on a Southern drawl for his mockery of questioning. Even the prison scenes feel routine with how Brendan Gleeson seems to be playing a satire of Chief O’Hara from the 60s Batman show with his Irish accent, but, much like the Joker, he’s reduced to a violent aggressor laced with dark comedy.

At over two hours, the film feels like it is filling time with theatrical production numbers and freewheeling rants as it crawls towards its telegraphed epiphanies of Joker being manipulated for his iconography. It’s much like how Batman said he was not so much a person but a symbol that Gotham needs. While Batman embraced that idea, however, Arthur’s realization creates a bile in his stomach, making him regret everything and molding a Joker who doesn’t want to be Joker and a film that doesn’t want to be based on a comic book character or even a sequel. Except, does the film even want that? It still adheres to Harley Quinn’s backstory (told rather than shown). It wants to showcase another Batman origin story with Harvey Dent, an inclusion so last-minute that the violent incident turning him into Two-Face is a whole lot of nothing.

There’s a half-baked quality to how the film interrogates its clown protagonist. Every moment where it feels like Arthur is getting closer to realizing he was a puppet, the film cuts without much transition to the next Joker variety hour musical act, making this movie feel more like an extended episode of Hee Haw. The music videos are not only distractingly divergent but seem to counter the scenes that proceed them, prolonging the snail-like pacing for a razor-thin narrative. The film becomes so lost in its uneven madness that the grand third act revelations arrive inexplicably, where the film seems to remind you at the last minute that there are still protests in Gotham despite saying so little about them or their impact.

Joker: Folie à Deux is a hideously meandering film loaded with contempt for comic books, their fans, and itself. While there is a certain boldness in daring to critique Joker’s infamy in and outside of the film, none of that deconstruction is evoked when the film is cluttered with random fantasy musicals and courtroom scenes that spend more time filibustering than interrogating. The entertainment value of treating crime like a spectacle seems to be a less blurred subject for the film, yet the film seems to cater to those whims, where the fans who couldn’t get enough of Joker’s dancing will get a lot more that in the sequel. As director Todd Phillips has tried to describe the sequel, it’s a film that wants to say something about societal perceptions of trials but also is a film made by crazy people. It has enough musical numbers to be considered a musical, but Phillips stresses it’s not a musical, despite initial plans for a Broadway show. Phillips wanted to do something new and different by including Harley Quinn, even though the previous Joker from Suicide Squad included Harley. The result is brooding slop that tosses so many ideas into the pot that the stew tastes rancid, failing to appease those seeking either a postmodern retooling of comic book characters or Joker fans who only want to see more cavorting in clown makeup. This film is searching for its voice amid all its singing and ranting, but it only comes up with guttural noises in the madness.

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