Fans excited for the sequel to Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning Joker are, apparently, going to be disappointed. Joker: Folie à Deux, an incredibly annoying movie title to have to type out in Google Docs, premiered Wednesday at the Venice Film Festival to dismal reviews. It turns out that not even Lady Gaga in a musical is enough to paint a Joker-esque smile on critics’ faces.
Despite trailers teasing the sequel as a movie-musical epic, IGN’s Siddhant Adlakha wrote that the movie is “actually more of a courtroom drama, and not a very interesting one at that.”
Vulture’s headline is that the movie “commits the mortal sin of wasting Lady Gaga.” Alison Willmore wrote, “Her Lee isn’t an equal partner to Arthur but another accessory in his grand tragedy — a supercharged, scary-eyed take on a serial-killer groupie.”
Indiewire went so far as to say that director Todd Phillips’ musical sequel “feels like it’s bad on purpose.” David Ehrlich wrote that the film is “boring, flat, and such a criminal waste of Lady Gaga that we should demand a public hearing. The movie, he said, “tries and fails to make a point of our own frustrations with it.”
The most damning line of Ehrlich’s review: He said the film is “blockbuster filmmaking as a form of collective punishment.”
Anyone who thought the first Joker film was polarizing wasn’t won over by this sequel. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “strident, laborious and often flat-out tedious as the first film
Even the musical numbers aren’t enough to make the film worthwhile. “These song-and-dance numbers are a welcome opportunity to hear Gaga belting out some of the most romantic standards in the American songbook, and a less welcome opportunity to hear Phoenix delivering his own croakier renditions,” the BBC’s Nicholas Barber wrote. “And instead of moving the story along, as songs in musicals should, they slow it down. You're left with the feeling that Phillips simply didn't have enough of a plot to fill another two hours without them.”
The news isn’t all bad. There were some reviewers who were positive about the movie. The Independent’s Geoffrey Macnab said Folie à Deux was “just as bleak and daring as the original.” The Wrap’s William Bibbiani called the film an “impressively odd sequel.”
“Unlike the original, which finds a perverse heroism in Arthur Fleck’s failings, Folie à Deux doubles down on how pathetic he is, and always was,” Bibbiani wrote. “It’s a sad, pensive, and impressively odd motion picture that uses the theatricality of movie musicals to undermine its hero’s ambitions instead of elevating them.”
