Joker Folie a Deux review: A tedious, confused and resentful sequel

Oscar-winner Joaquin Phoenix returns with Lady Gaga for a film that will likely displease fans and alienate newcomers

Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck/Joker, left, and Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel in the film. Photo: Warner Bros Entertainment

Joker: Folie A Deux made me feel like a kid again – just not in a way that I’d missed. It reminded me of when my parents would put on an old musical, before I’d learnt to appreciate them, and I’d sit there waiting for the songs to end so they would get back to moving the story along.

The film’s director, Todd Phillips, has repeatedly insisted that the sequel to his 2019 blockbuster isn’t a strict musical. Perhaps it should have been. Instead, what we have here is a hybrid courtroom-prison drama in which Academy Award-winner Joaquin Phoenix and franchise newcomer Lady Gaga repeatedly pause the story to sing an old pop song – only there’s not much story to move along either.

The songs are ostensibly there so the characters, Arthur Fleck/Joker and Harley Quinn (here called Lee) respectively, can work through their feelings. In my preview screening in Dubai, comprised of a packed audience of devoted fans of the original, the only emotional reactions the songs elicited were collective groans that grew louder every time the symphony would start to swell.

A part of me feels Phillips wouldn’t mind this reaction, as Joker: Folie a Deux is a deeply resentful film. It’s resentful of its predecessor, of its audience, of the broader world and all the callously indifferent people that populate it.

The only person that the film doesn’t seem to resent is Arthur Fleck himself, and that’s only because it can’t quite figure out who he is. That’s really the point of the film, and the question we spend nearly 140 minutes tediously considering. And much like the last one, there’s no subtlety to be had here.

Here’s a joke that Fleck himself tells sombrely during one court room scene: “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Arthur Fleck. Arthur Fleck who?” The joke ends there, as we cut away to think about the confused nature of a man who became an idea and now feels devoured by it.

The film picks up not long after the first one left off. Fleck is in the prison ward of a mental institution, viciously beaten regularly by his guards. He’s awaiting trial for the people he killed, including the public shooting of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) live on television.

The outside world, meanwhile, thinks of Fleck as a folk hero, a larger-than-life figure known as Joker, who used a violent spectacle to reject the absurdity of the world’s many evils. He’s a powerful voice against the system, though not one that provides any alternative, instead embodying the desire to burn it all down.

Lady Gaga plays his biggest fan, a patient in the psych ward who is enamoured with Fleck’s Joker side and wants to partner with him so the two can become king and queen of a hell of their own making. For Fleck, this is the first time he’s experienced love in his life – his mother saw him as a burden and a disappointment – and makes him want to become something bigger than the shell he’s resigned himself to in prison.

Ironically, it’s not Joker who he wants to become, and throughout the film, Joker feels like a costume rather than a character, rejecting the promise of the previous film’s end. When we see glimpses of Joker in the court room scenes, it feels somewhere between an impression and a cameo, a flicker of anti-hero light that quickly blows out. If the first film was an origin story, this is a blackened mirror, stubbornly refusing to reflect.

Love helps Arthur see his humanity, makes him want to consider who he is, was, and how he got there instead of destroying himself in favour of an idea, a shadow. But the idea he created was too powerful, and the film seems to imply that if he doesn’t want to be Joker, that doesn’t mean that Joker won’t persist – with or without him.

These are interesting ideas, admittedly. I’m almost talking myself into liking the film the more I think about it. But the framework doesn't satisfyingly or compellingly mine the ideas. Perhaps it would take a writer who could scratch a little deeper, or plot a bit stronger, than Phillips is seemingly capable of or interested in being on his own.

Because even if, in the days after watching it, you’re able to craft some compelling mental scaffolding when considering this failed sequel, nothing can erase the tedious experience of sitting through its hollow, tensionless courtroom sequences and monotonous, excruciatingly violent prison scenes.

There’s one scene early on in which Lee and Arthur flirt with the idea of a prison escape, running into the night as the building burns behind them. This is the only time I felt genuine excitement, hoping that maybe I was wrong to assume we were about to spend the entire sequel stuck in these two locations, and maybe a grander story was about to break free. That hope was quickly squashed.

To me, the first film felt like a warning against the monsters that a cruel world creates. It felt like a call to action against a broken society, an act of radical empathy so accessible that anyone who watched it was able to see their own pain reflected in his face paint.

And what do we end up with here? Redemption doesn’t seem possible. There will never be a place for Arthur Flecks, only Jokers. Was that a message worth returning for? What are we doing here, exactly?