When I saw “Joker” at the Venice Film Festival five years ago, I took extreme and indignant offense to it, and I poured out that outrage – some readers wrongly thought in a hastily written review. (I was later told that I could have taken some time to cool off: a review embargo on the film remained in effect for another five hours after I submitted my notice.) Not wanting to give away any plot spoilers, I didn’t . reveal the main source of my outrage.

What startled me was the film’s climax, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, now almost full Joker, appears on a late night talk show hosted by smooth-talking showman Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). Franklin’s goal is a mockery of the man in clown makeup. But Arthur has the last laugh: he pulls out a gun and blows Franklin’s brains out on live TV.

This shocked me in a very not-good way. Partly because I was pretty sure this plot point was inspired by the 1987 suicide of Pennsylvania political figure R. Budd Dwyer. The footage of him committing suicide was obviously edited for news reports, but I was such a media insider at the time that I was able to view the unexpurgated footage of the suicide. And to this day I wish I hadn’t. The similarities between the real-life event and what director Todd Philips staged struck me as too specific to be coincidental. I viewed what Phillips and Phoenix (and yes, De Niro) have done as unforgivable opportunistic nihilism.

So there you have it, in case you were wondering. In my review I wrote: “In contemporary films, ‘dark’ is just a different flavor. Like ‘edgy’, it is an option you use depending on the market you want to reach. And it’s especially useful when injected into the comic book genre.

And now I’m back on the Joker beat for the sequel, “Joker: Folie a Deux,” which, as you’ve no doubt heard, is a musical written and directed, like the first film, by Todd Phillips. Fortunately, Phillips didn’t write the songs. This is largely a jukebox musical, with selections from The Great American Songbook (“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered”) and international ’60s pop (“To Love Somebody,” originated by the Bee Gees and further popularized by Janis Joplin) and more. And the best thing I can say about it is that it clearly doesn’t take into account marketing as it is conventionally understood.

Before we judge the ultimate purpose of making the second “Joker” movie into a musical, we should acknowledge that its rationale is demonstrably correct. That is, Arthur Fleck, who here makes a serious distinction between himself as a citizen and himself as “Joker,” is a deeply disturbed individual whose twisted imagination may well imagine his existence as a kind of show. So we can admit that the filmmakers are acting in good faith by framing this as a musical. Doing this can also help them escape an otherwise desperate situation. The film is narratively, psychologically and aesthetically incoherent. Still, it can fall into the first two categories because musicals can get away with being narratively and psychologically incoherent just by the nature of their being, you know, musicals.

As it keeps reminding you, the story takes place in the almost immediate aftermath of the horrific murder that ended “Joker.” Arthur/Joker is imprisoned in one of Arkham’s dark, Satanic mill-like mental institutions, and during one of his walks to see a visitor, he is practically waved at by a young woman singing in an open room. That’s Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel (DC mavens may be annoyed that she never goes full Harley Quinn here), and the two soon conspire to see as much of each other as their captivity allows before Arthur’s trial, to which Lee insists is suddenly granted civilian status in a rather mysterious manner. to be present as a spectator. (This is explained sufficiently, if not entirely believably.) Arthur is grinning and sullen when he’s not in his Joker makeup, but rest assured he gets to do that plenty, both in song fantasies and in the reality of the trial. And then he says, “Joker.”

The process and romance are the core of this seemingly endless film. There are bits – like Joker’s impersonation of a drawling Southern lawyer – that might have been entertaining if they weren’t positioned in what seems like the eighth or ninth hour of the film. Ultimately, the paper-thin story boils down to the same nihilistic slop that Phillips served up in the first ‘Joker’, albeit remixed in terms of genre.

Some early reviews complained that the film doesn’t have much to offer in the way of “Joker Fan Service.” This makes me laugh a little; I understand that the character is indeed a pop culture phenomenon and indeed fictional, but considering what exactly he is about, what exactly would “Joker Fan Service” entail? You might as well talk about ‘Charles Manson Fan Service’. It is certainly a sick and twisted world we live in.

The only other aspect of the film I can be positive about, aside from the indifference to the audience it attracts, is that of the execution. Both Lady Gaga and Phoenix clearly put a lot of work into their characterizations and interactions. For example, the different performance modes they use when singing are subdued and fallible in their own ‘real lives’, full-fledged professional quality in their shared dreams. While Gaga holds his own throughout the film, Phoenix’s virtuosity eventually turns into narcissistic exhibitionism (his apparent Joker “dance” actually looks like he’s doing pre-yoga stretches). But it remains virtuosity, for whatever it’s worth.