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Joker 2 Movie Review

Joker 2 is a musical crime film directed by Todd Phillips and starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga. It’s such a bad, pointless sequel.

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“You get what you fucking deserve“

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Struggling with his dual identity, failed comedian Arthur Fleck meets the love of his life, Harley Quinn, while incarcerated at Arkham State Hospital. 2019’s ‘Joker’ was one of the biggest movies of that year both commercially and critically. It even garnered a couple of Oscar wins under its belt. Suffice to say, we were always going to get a sequel. But few could actually predict just how misguided this project would turn out to be.

While the original was just a rehash of ‘Taxi Driver’, it was a competent redo of that same idea about the one percent versus the 99 percent. It is easy to see why so many people, especially young men empathized with the titular antagonist and the movie was surely universally relatable in that respect. But Todd Phillips was apparently horrified of his film’s reception and what it meant to people, going so far as to call its fans “incels”, which led to his decision to literally give a middle finger to these fans. This wasn’t just toxic, but extremely offensive and just plain pointless to me. No movie at all would have been a much better choice.

That disrespect that Phillips shows to his own audience is by far the worst offence of this miscalculated project, but there are other areas where the movie felt thoroughly misguided. For one, we have the fact that this was supposed to be a musical and we have no memorable numbers whatsoever. I was not against the idea of this sequel being a musical as I am a fan of the genre and original approaches to IP filmmaking. I had even expected that it would work. Imagine my surprise, then, that the final product is so bland.

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The songs are not just boring and forgettable, but most of them are just reused, making this a tiresome jukebox musical. Original songs would have been a much better choice for it. Phillips is obviously not a musical director and it shows. These numbers did not pop at any moment. They lacked the majesty, memorable sets, visual flourishes and strong choreography that is needed in a competent musical feature. They were so unexciting that they felt like padding to me, especially as they failed to relate to the plot at hand.

There is another big offence here and that is of of course the treatment of Lady Gaga. Why would you cast her if you didn’t want to give her ample screen time or an opportunity to belt a big number is beyond me. She is so ridiculously sidelined here that we never really get to properly meet this version of Harley Quinn. She is very good in the role and I liked her look and a more realistic approach at this character’s depiction, but she got so little attention with the majority of the movie ignoring her and that was super frustrating to watch.

As for Joaquin Phoenix, he was fine in Joker 2, but nowhere near as compelling as he was before. He was reduced to a pathetic caricature here, lacking the potency of the first movie’s depiction. What they did to him throughout this movie was so horrible and I found this trauma porn insufferable to watch. The film is well shot and edited, but the directing is terrible, the runtime is overly extensive and the courtroom drama scenes were just a repeat of what happened before. It’s such a tedious movie that didn’t even work in the meta context.

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