2024-10-09 05:21:31
Four years ago, director Todd Phillips tried to enrich the superhero genre with mature themes with Joker. The result was worldwide sales of over a billion dollars and two Oscars, but also the castration of comic book material and the stealing of motifs from the works of Martin Scorsese.
The attempt to create a tragic anti-hero in the sequel Joker: Folie á deux, which will be shown in Czech cinemas this Thursday, only expands the range of genres in which the author cannot navigate.
We start with a cartoon. Looney Tunes-like characters run across the screen and do crazy things that only animated creatures can do to each other. Paradoxically, we are watching the only frame sequence that has at least some charge.
After this prologue, the story moves to the famous fictional Arkham prison, where many villains from the Batman world have had their way and where the hero Arthur Fleck also ended up at the end of Joker from 2019. Now he is awaiting trial here – the first to be televised live. The first part offered an alternative origin of the villain Joker. He portrayed Arthur Fleck as a bankrupt stand-up comedian who kills a TV host live. Now it’s as if the city wants to take revenge on him with a similar “live” trial.
The motives that the creators use to set the plot in motion this time will be enough for the audience. The first film tried to create an anti-hero even excessively inspired by the protagonist of Martin Scorsese’s films such as The King of Comedy or Taxi Driver. Unfortunately, this modern “king of incels” is just a poor woman, whose actions are impossible to relate to even in the movie Joker: Folie á deux.
The 2019 film was hailed by some as a bold big-budget film capable of capturing the tensions of the time. Rather, Todd Phillips joins Zack Snyder as another author who wants to play adults in the Batman world, even though he lacks the necessary equipment to do so.
The film practically does not leave the gates of Arkham Prison. The picture features Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker and Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. | Photo: Niko Tavernis
Joker is one of Hollywood’s most overrated works of recent times, a juvenile would-be psychological study aimed at those who consume comic books according to persistent stereotypes. That is, to shy men who draw ideas about the world only from the pages of comics.
The first part wanted to be a study of a deprived individual as well as a diagnosis of the society that creates such individuals. He got rid of everything comic book, action and Batman, but he remained “comic book” in one way: he was predictable and literal.
Now it seems as if the creators tried to lose even those viewers who liked the first part. They practically do not leave the gates of Arkham Prison and boldly try to combine two disparate genres: court drama and musical. After trying to imitate Scorsese, the former author of fairly successful crazy comedies like Shooting in Vegas Todd Phillips only expands the palette of Hollywood styles in which he is not exactly at home.
Even the attempt to link the live media coverage of the Joker trial to the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann is unintentionally comical.
Before the tribunal is not a monstrous criminal or a contradictory complicated individual, but only a poor man afflicted with a mental disorder, which is what the Joker was reduced to in the first part – however much Joaquin Phoenix tried to convince the opposite with his determined acting performance, which won him an Oscar, and to give this uninteresting character at least some internal drama.
The movie Joker: Folie à Deux will start showing in Czech cinemas this Thursday. | Video: Vertical Entertainment
The worst thing about Phillips’ entire two-part project is that most of the scenes feel like he hates what he’s inspired by. Why is he making a movie from the batman world if he only uses names and realities, otherwise he doesn’t take anything from it? And why does he film musical numbers, when he then convinces those around him at press conferences that the film is not a musical, that the musical scenes are just another form of dialogue, that Fleck lacks words, so he expresses everything by singing?
It would be ironic to note: haven’t musicals been doing this until now, expressing in song what cannot be said in words? While the musical numbers tend to be spectacular, the director has stripped them of any sheen. And he didn’t add anything.
The film strips the musical numbers of any sheen. | Photo: Niko Tavernis
Joker: Folie à Deux is only a 138-minute long mish-mash of pointlessly alternating genres. In addition to the Joker, who is not actually the Joker, comic book fans will also be offered his companion Harley Quinn played by the singer Lady Gaga. But she’s not the comic book character either.
Instead of a woman who succumbs to a manic villain and then deals with a breakup, she is the one who admires, seduces and emboldens Arthur Fleck. Both of them fall into a momentary crazy love following the example of musicals from the 1950s and 1960s, which the film clumsily imitates.
But Harley Quinn is just an obsessive fan here, an instrument that makes Fleck momentarily become the comic book clown he never was during the course of both films. This is also probably the only moment when the rigid work comes alive for a moment.
The Batman world has already offered plenty of strong cinematic visions. “Why so serious?” Heath Ledger memorably asked as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. As if anticipating how unhappily the same hero would be seized by Todd Phillips.
Another Gotham villain, The Penguin, played by Colin Farrell, is currently on the screens in another branch of the Batman universe. And it much more viable turns comic book Gotham into an enormously dark, bleak city that doesn’t need Batman or a plethora of action sequences. This gangster still feels like her creators love to move around in the comic book world and really inspired them, however much they also deviate from the canon.
Todd Phillips in both Joker films unfortunately remains an author who not only doesn’t understand his inspirations, but doesn’t even seem to care about them. This juvenile play on art is quite possibly the saddest thing going on in Hollywood today.