• ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ opens in cinemas on Friday.
• Joaquin Phoenix returns to play Joker, and Lady Gaga stars as his love interest, Harley Quinn.
• The film is being trashed by critics and has a 36% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Five years after “Joker” became a sensation, grossing more than $1 billion and earning Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar for his portrayal of the DC Comics villain, director Todd Phillips is reteaming with Phoenix for the sequel “Joker: Folie à Deux.”

As in the original, Phoenix delivers a depressing portrait of Arthur Fleck, this time as the character awaits trial for the murders he committed in the first film. The second time around, he also has a love interest: Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel, a fellow inmate at Arkham Asylum who is enamored with the headline-grabbing antics that brought Fleck to shame.

The film is part courtroom drama, part musical. Yes, you heard right: the second Joker film is a musical. But so far the critics have not applauded. As of publication, “Folie à Deux” has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 36%.

This is bad news for Warner Bros. The Joker sequel, which had a budget of just under $200 million, is expected to bring in around $50 million in its opening weekend at the domestic box office, a far cry from the first film’s $96 million opening weekend. take, which was a record for an October release. Needless to say, WB is unlikely to have another billion-dollar earner here.

(Don’t feel sorry for the studio, though: It currently has three titles in the top 10 highest-grossing films of 2024: “Dune: Part Two,” “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.”)

Here’s a sampling of what critics think of “Joker: Folie à Deux,” now in theaters.

It’s a sequel about nothing

The biggest criticism of “Folie à Deux” is that it’s about, well, Nothing.

It could have been a prison break film or a full-blown musical, but Phillips decided to have Arthur Fleck sit in a courtroom and repeat the events of the first film.

Nick Schager of The Daily Beast said it best when he compared his viewing experience to a famous show about nothing.

“‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ is often reminiscent of the series finale of ‘Seinfeld,’ insofar as it puts the main character on trial for his past misdeeds,” he wrote. “It’s a crime to make the DC Comics icon so bland, and neutralize Phoenix’s live-wire creepiness through endless psychoanalysis.”

‘Folie à Deux’ is really a musical, just not a good one

From the moment the first footage of “Folie à Deux” was shown at CinemaCon in April, Phillips was coy about the sequel being a musical, promising that “it will all make sense when you see it.”

To most critics, it didn’t make sense.

“‘Folie à Deux’ simply taps dances into place for most of its listless running time, stringing together a series of disappointing musical numbers that are either too sharp to convey anything that Arthur couldn’t express without them, or its characters are too vaguely related to express anything at all,” wrote IndieWire’s David Ehrlich.

Pete Hammond of Deadline was one of the few critics who appreciated the musical numbers, calling them “artful.”

‘With song, dance, comedy, darkness, animation, drama, violence and more, this is a musical – if that’s what it is is a musical – like no other,” he wrote.

In what can hardly be considered a compliment, TIME’s Stephanie Zacharek noted that the musical numbers at least had more to offer than the rest of the film.

“The musical numbers in ‘Folie à Deux’ — especially those fantasy scenes, rendered in harsh colors — are the most vibrant thing about it, though they aren’t even enough to shake the film from its bleak conclusion,” she wrote.

However, Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post, like most critics, is amazed by Phoenix and Gaga’s musical style.

“Phillips, who clearly dreams of working for MGM in the 1940s, somehow saw this as a logical opportunity for the pair to perform a Broadway musical’s worth of songs – a good 15, all in all,” he wrote. “The choice is reminiscent of a song from ‘Miss Saigon’: ‘Why, God, Why?'”

They didn’t have to do Lady Gaga like that

Lady Gaga is one of the few artists who can convincingly hold her own against Phoenix’s unpredictable Joker. Critics were mainly disappointed that her talents were underused.

Vulture’s Alison Willmore said the film was “a waste of her presence.”

“In its relentless gloom, ‘Folie à Deux’ traps Gaga in a visitors’ booth where she tries to pretend she can’t blow the plexiglass walls off with her rendition of ‘(They Long to Be) Close to You,'” she wrote .

But The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney points out in his review that there’s a reason Phillips isn’t letting her go for Gaga.

“Since Lee isn’t meant to be a polished singer, Gaga stomps her vocals down to a raw, scratchy sound,” he wrote. “But in the handful of scenes where fantasy sets her free in full glory, the film floats along with her.”

Regardless, Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson found Gaga’s performance “surprisingly boring.”

“Her presence suggested something big, cozy and more broadly accessible, inviting those who might have been alienated by Joker’s grim vision of lonely, heterosexual male rage,” he wrote.

“She is woefully underused, her character merely serving as an emissary to Arthur’s acolytes, proving that women’s attention is fleeting and conditional,” Lawson continued. “Phillips laughs at the idea that Lee could ever truly love someone like Arthur. Ultimately, she comes across as a fickle creature who can’t bear the real truth of a man.”

It’s certainly not a film for the fans

Critics pointed out that Phillips seems to enjoy doing the opposite of fanservice at every turn, essentially burning the goodwill he built among fans of the first film.

“There are plenty of scenes in which Arthur dresses up as the Joker, defends himself in court, sings this or that chestnut, sometimes in fantasy songs that almost play in his head. But there is no longer any danger to his presence. He is not. ” He’s trying to kill someone, and he’s not leading a revolution. He’s just singing and dancing in his Joker daydream,” Variety’s Owen Gleiberman wrote.

“He’s nobody,” wrote the BBC’s Nicholas Barber of the character Arthur Fleck. “Depending on how you look at it, this demythologizing exercise is daring or annoyingly smug, but it’s certainly not much fun. Phillips seems to be saying that if you fell for Fleck’s messianic self-image the last time, the joke is no more.” on you.”

“Of ‘Folie à Deux,‘ Phillips gives fans a comedown that essentially punishes them for enjoying the volatile energy of the first film,” TIME’s Zacharek concluded. “It’s more of a correction than a sequel, a Go Directly to Jail card in movie form.”