What do you get when you cross a loosely-adapted comic book movie with a billion dollars at the box office and 11 Oscar nominations? Well, you get Joker: Folie à Deux, a sequel borne not of artistic necessity but of financial potentiality. On paper, it doesn’t seem like a lazy effort; after all, it’s a full-blown musical that spends most of its runtime either in a prison or a courtroom. But it’s clear that director and co-writer Todd Phillips is simply out of his element here. It’s no secret that Phillips borrowed heavily from two Scorsese classics (Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy) when creating Joker. It’s ironic (or perhaps fitting) that his follow-up seems to track so closely with Scorsese’s New York, New York, a dolefully nostalgic musical so poorly received that it sent the director into a downward spiral. Don’t be surprised if we see a black-and-white boxing epic from Phillips 5 years from now.

It’s two years after the events of Joker and Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has been committed to Arkham State Hospital while awaiting trial for the murders he committed. Taking up his case is attorney Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), who plans to argue that Arthur’s crimes were the result of a split personality over which he had no control. The conditions of Arkham are bleak — courtesy of thuggish prison guards like Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) — but a bright spot appears in the form of fellow inmate Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), whom Arthur meets in music therapy. Despite the unusual circumstances, the pair fall for one another but as the media frenzy around Arthur’s hotly anticipated trial continues the swirl, will their burgeoning bond survive the madness?

To be clear: Joker: Folie à Deux isn’t bad because it’s a musical; it’s bad because it’s not a good musical. Instead of crafting original songs, Todd Phillips opts for standards like the ones Lady Gaga sang with Tony Bennett on the albums they collaborated on before his passing. Obviously the songs are in her wheelhouse and she belts them out well, but Phillips doesn’t even try to stage cogent musical numbers to feature her towering vocals. Understandably, Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t match her vocally but you could make the argument he’s singing “in character” more as Arthur, where Gaga doesn’t register as playing a character during her songs. Aside from a few cheek-to-cheek reveries, the choreography often seems haphazard and almost improvised in the rest of the sequences. The switches to song-and-dance mode often feel perfunctory and there are periods where the film seems embarrassed to admit that it’s a musical.

As underwhelming as Joker: Folie à Deux is as a musical, its ultimate undoing is that it’s a narratively inert courtroom drama as well. Putting Arthur on trial may have seemed like a satisfying narrative arc in theory but for the purposes of this sequel, it anchors its ambitions down with callbacks and reframing of events from the first film. It also puts front and center how little Todd Phillips actually understands or cares about Arthur in the first place; most of the testimony is centered around how awful his character was to people around him in Joker. Borrowing from the “God’s lonely man” mold from the aforementioned Scorsese classics, Phillips was at least able to feign empathy for his central character the first time around but here, he has no idea what to make of him and his actions. This aimlessness affects Joaquin Phoenix’s performance too, whose work here is still passable but not nearly as arresting as it was in his initial Oscar-winning role.

Aside from an opening animated sequence that feels like it’s trying too hard to throw the audience off kilter, the early stretch of Joker: Folie à Deux is its most promising. If the end of Joker positioned the titular rogue as a folk hero for the downtrodden, Folie à Deux provides a sobering counterpoint to infamy with its dispiriting prison sequences. Even though the guard characters are inconsistently written, Phillips reliably hits the prison drama beats with cinematographer Lawrence Sher, returning from Joker with camerawork that’s more claustrophobic than the predecessor but no less compelling. Frankly, someone more talented than Phillips would’ve had more success with this project but since he was never going to turn down the paycheck, why not play to the director’s strengths and make this a road movie? Phillips directed Road Trip, Due Date and three The Hangover films, so why not have Arthur and Lee hit the road like Bonnie and Clyde?

Score – 2/5

Coming to theaters this weekend:
Saturday Night, starring Gabriel LaBelle and Rachel Sennott, is a biopic based on the true story of what happened in the 90 minutes prior to the 1975 premiere of NBC’s debut of Saturday Night Live.
Piece By Piece, starring Pharrell Williams and Morgan Neville, which documents the life and musical career of producer Pharrell Williams, incorporating his faith and expressing his artistry by means of Lego.
Terrifier 3, starring David Howard Thornton and Lauren LaVera, continues the saga of the murderous Art The Clown, as survivors of his Halloween massacre struggle to rebuild their shattered lives during the holiday season.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup