There are, as Oscar Wilde famously quipped, two great tragedies in life: one, not getting what you want – and the other, getting it. It’s an aphorism that will be keenly felt by comic book fans this weekend, as Joker: Folie à Deux arrives in cinemas. The film – a sequel to 2019’s Joker, the dour DC Comics adaptation that reimagined Batman’s clown nemesis as a violent, frustrated incel in the Travis Bickle mould – feels like a pointed attempt to adult-ise the superhero genre. Plenty of comic book fans have been clamouring for exactly this: a superhero film that demands to be taken seriously, a gritty, grounded story that just so happens to take place in a world of caped vigilantes. Well, now they’ve got it.
Over the past decade and a half, superhero adaptations have been the dominant force in popular cinema. But for all the money they make, for all the cultural oxygen they inhale, there’s always a caveat: the refusal, in some critical circles, to regard them as substantial works of art. Martin Scorsese’s likening of Marvel films to “theme parks” is a comparison that has stuck like tar. Likewise the ubiquitous “fast food of cinema” analogy. But it’s an inferiority complex that is only halfway justified. Yes, the genre still has its naysayers. But even before Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Joker won him Best Actor at the Academy Awards, superhero films had hardly been shut out of the corridors of prestige: as early as 1979, Superman won an Oscar (for visual effects), while The Dark Knight, with Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning villain turn, showed that critics were perfectly willing to recognise the artistic merits of a great comic book blockbuster. But still, fans called to push the boat further out, to make ever more self-serious films, an object utterly impervious to accusations of frivolity. Folie à Deux is this object. It’s credible, restrained… and completely, utterly dull.
In light of the new film, the original Joker now seems like a dry run – a comic book movie that was aesthetically sober and adult but ultimately capitulated to the kind of showy, facile bombast that fans might expect. In its third act, Joker saw its protagonist, mentally ill party clown Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) shoot and kill a talk show host on live TV, murder several other people, and incite a riot. The sequel walks back this bombast, unspools it, condemns it. It is a film that abjectly resists its own premise, a film about a supervillain who refuses the call to supervillainy.
The majority of Folie à Deux concerns Joker’s imprisonment and murder trial. We get scenes in the prison yard. Scenes of discussions with his lawyer. Endless micro-insights into Fleck’s psyche. The film is, incongruously, a jukebox musical, but the songs, old show tunes, offer little in the way of escape. Other than a brief (and surprisingly funny) sequence of courtroom showmanship, Folie à Deux is punishingly subdued, an exercise in deliberate denial. Pop superstar Lady Gaga is brought in as the hugely popular character Harley Quinn, Joker’s chaotic paramour (given, in this film, the fractionally less fanciful name of Lee Quinzel) – but even she is ultimately unable to coax a supervillainous turn out of Fleck. Towards the end of the movie, Fleck is sprung from the courtroom, and Folie à Deux for a moment seems to capitulate to its genre, inching towards a spectacular action sequence – but no. None arrives. This, director Todd Phillips seems to be saying, is what realistic superhero fiction really is.
Folie à Deux is Michael Corleone in Godfather Part III, Stringer Bell in season three of The Wire – an inveterate criminal seeking the approval of straight society. But, like those men, it’s finding that approval is hard to come by. By most conventional metrics, the original Joker was an unequivocal success, breaking the record at the time for the highest-grossing R-rated movie (making over $1bn), on top of the Oscar win. Folie à Deux, with even more creative freedom and a bigger budget (close to $200m, supposedly – in the same ballpark as huge effects-driven blockbusters such as Avengers Assemble) was poised to be a triumphant encore. But if predictions and early reactions are anything to go by, the general public won’t be having it. A glut of negative reviews hasn’t helped, of course (though The Independent branded it “formally daring”). But this is a film that seems designed to displease, and its audience can smell it in the air, like a gas leak.
The irony is, in truly committing to the experiment of a serious Joker film, Phillips has proven precisely why there’s no need for one. Arthur Fleck may be more psychologically realistic than Ledger’s electric interpretation of the character in The Dark Knight, but he’s nowhere near as entertaining to watch – or as artful. Perversely, Folie à Deux succumbs to the same prejudices that comic fans so despise – the idea that a film needs to be “arty” and “adult” to be taken seriously. In disfiguring the genre into the shape of something resembling “proper art”, Folie à Deux has sacrificed the very things that made superhero films worthwhile in the first place. Who’s laughing now? Absolutely no one.