Warning: This piece contains full spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux.
In what is sure to be one of the more divisive releases of the year, Joker: Folie à Deux is now in theaters. The sequel to the 2019 smash hit is once again directed by Todd Phillips, who doesn’t seem to be enjoying as rapturous a reception this time around. IGN’s Siddhant Adlakha gave the film a 5/10 in his review, and many other critics agree with him. The DC sequel has been criticized for its sluggish pace, unfocused tone, poorly directed musical sequences, and for criminally underutilizing Lady Gaga, to the point that it makes one wonder why they even bothered paying for her to be in the movie. But perhaps worst of all is how Joker 2’s twist ending renders both this film and its predecessor kind of pointless.
We’ll get to the twist in a moment, but Joker: Folie à Deux feels like a movie that’s at war with itself. It’s a Joker movie that ends up not really being a Joker movie, and a musical that ends up not really being a musical. It works backwards to try to present itself as above the genre and franchise it’s adapting, only to wind up falling flat on its face. Let’s take a look at why Joker: Folie à Deux’s biggest surprise is also its most frustrating aspect.
Will the Real Joker Please Stand Up?
It turns out Todd Phillips wasn’t kidding when he said that Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck would never become the Clown Prince of Crime. The big twist ending of Joker: Folie à Deux is that Arthur Fleck is not, in fact, the Joker. While representing himself in court for the murders he committed in the last film, Fleck admits that the Joker persona is not truly a separate personality, and that he is in fact responsible for his actions. This disillusions Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn into giving up on him (she was in love with Joker, not Fleck), and leaves him sad and alone as he returns to death row once he’s recaptured after someone (we never find out who) bombs the courthouse most of the film takes place in. The other part of the ending? Arthur Fleck is dead. Not because he was executed, but because he was killed by the real Joker.
Yes, really. An unnamed background inmate in Arkham (played by Connor Storrie) who doesn’t have any lines until the last scene stabs Arthur repeatedly before giving himself a Glasgow smile as Arthur dies. Although it’s not said out loud, the clear idea at play here is that this inmate killing Arthur is part of his own origin story as the future Clown Prince of Crime, which makes spending two entire movies on the character who isn’t a bizarre choice. Despite the accolades, the first film received criticism for feeling like a shameless rip-off of Martin Scorsese films, most notably The King of Comedy, which it shares most of its plot with (and which is a great movie that you should watch if you haven’t). But the counterargument from some was that in Hollywood’s current “IP or nothing” mentality, filmmakers like Phillips who want to make character pieces have to sneak them into franchise vehicles like a Joker origin movie to ever get them made.
Setting aside that it’s dubious how much of a “character piece” these are when after two movies Fleck still doesn’t feel like all that deep of a character, the second film operates like a tantrum in response to this situation. Whether or not Phillips said he wanted to make Joker 2, he spends the entire sequel relitigating the last film and then torches the franchise on his way out. Nothing of consequence happens until Fleck’s death, so what was the point of it all? Even the title, Folie à Deux, which roughly translates to “madness for two” in French, is a misnomer because Fleck and Harley’s relationship doesn’t get as much screentime as you’d think. They never go out in public together as Joker and Harley like they do in the marketing, since Fleck spends nearly the entire film incarcerated. Ultimately, this twist reminds us of another famous one from a superhero film, one that did the whole idea far better than Folie à Deux does.
Iron Man 3 and the Mandarin Twist
Iron Man 3 is a great movie, remaining one of the MCU’s best entries because of its strong directorial vision, being the best character examination of Tony Stark in the franchise, and its consistent thematic angle of critiquing post 9/11 War on Terror fear-mongering as a function of the US military industrial complex. To make that point, director Shane Black reimagined Iron Man’s main nemesis from the comics, The Mandarin, as a sham generated by Aldrich Killian to provide a convenient cover story for his Extremis test subjects repeatedly exploding. The Mandarin was actually actor Trevor Slattery, who is hilarious once unveiled, but many comic book fans were frustrated by the fake-out, having hoped for a more accurate take on the character, especially since the trailers were heavy on Ben Kingsley’s take on the role.
I’m not here to tell fans they were wrong for feeling that way. I love the comics too, guys. But the fact remains that of all the archenemies of Marvel’s biggest heroes, the Mandarin was always the odd one out of the group. Whereas Doctor Doom, Magneto, Green Goblin, the Red Skull and Loki have endured through decades of comics and adaptations, the Mandarin’s racist origins as a Yellow Peril stereotype and the lack of an all-time iconic story arc to his name (although John Byrne’s Dragon Seed Saga is quite good) meant that he was exactly the sort of character who could be reinterpreted in this way. It was a subversion of expectations, but it was done for a specific artistic purpose: to scrub the icky context from the Mandarin’s conception, and to make the movie a critique of the cultural apparatus that creates villains like him to demonize other nations and ethnicities so that people are a bit more amenable to the United States military – or any other military – invading and occupying their lands in real life.
Folie à Deux, on the other hand, has no such lofty ambitions. The reveal that Arthur isn’t the Joker followed by his subsequent death only reads as an insult to the audience, an angry protest from the filmmakers that they were forced to make comic book adaptations (despite the millions they received in compensation) when they would rather make “real” movies. Except the problem is that Phillips’ attempts to emulate more celebrated films in writing and cinematography are empty gestures that only further highlight how unsuited he is to non-comedic material. The ending is both dramatically unsatisfying on its own terms and fails to sell that its director would be a good fit for the types of films he’s ripping off. This vacuous, self-hating attitude bleeds into the rest of the movie, turning it into one of the biggest misses of the year.
Face the Music
Beyond the twist, the other big conceit is that Folie à Deux is also a musical. Turning a Joker sequel into a jukebox musical of all things is the kind of go-for-broke creative swing that could have led to a fascinating film in the right hands. Instead, Folie à Deux includes many scenes where characters do indeed sing, but the filmmaking does nothing to back them up. Because Phillips doesn’t know how to shoot a musical, he just keeps using the faux gritty camerawork he uses in the rest of the picture, rendering the musical sequences inert because they lack the color or energy that musicals need to reach the heightened emotional tone the genre asks for.
The movie downplays its musical elements in the same way it downplays its comic book origins. Lady Gaga, one of the most popular singers on the face of the Earth, was paid $12 million to be in the film, but she didn’t compose an original song for the soundtrack, nor do they give her a big power ballad among the covers. Her singing is such an inconsequential part of the movie that she had to do a whole separate companion album to get the energy out of her system. It all leads back to the question of… why? Why make a Joker sequel if it was going to go out of its way to make itself and the previous film a waste of time? Why make it a musical if you weren’t going to shoot it like one? Why hire Lady Gaga if you’re not going to give her the spotlight to sing, literally the main thing you hire Lady Gaga to do?
Once again, it’s a problem of attitude. Folie à Deux is the latest movie musical that really doesn’t want you to know it’s a musical before you enter the theater. Gaga even publicly said it wasn’t one on the press tour. Every genre and style that Folie à Deux tosses into the blender is treated like this. It’s a comic book adaptation that doesn’t want to be a comic book adaptation, a musical that doesn’t know how to be a musical, a courtroom drama too boring to work as a courtroom drama, a romance film that doesn’t spend enough time on the romance, and a character study that forgets to give its lead character enough dimension to study. It’s a movie comprised entirely of things it doesn’t want to be, without ever figuring out what it actually is. At a time when we’re looking towards a new future for DC films with James Gunn’s upcoming Superman reboot, it’d be in all of our best interests to leave movies like Folie à Deux in the past.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.