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    • Joker: Folie à Deux’s biggest surprise is a repeat of a controversial Marvel moment
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    Joker: Folie à Deux’s biggest surprise is a repeat of a controversial Marvel moment

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    Warning: This piece contains full spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux.

    In what will surely be one of the most divisive releases of the year, Joker: Folie à Deux is in theaters now. The sequel to the 2019 big hit is again directed by Todd Phillips, which is not so enthusiastically received this time. Siddhant Adlakha of IGN gave the film a 5/10 in his reviewand many other critics I agree with him. The DC sequel has been criticized for its slow pace, unfocused tone, poorly directed musical sequences, and criminally underutilizing Lady Gaga, to the point that it makes you wonder why they even bothered to include her in the film pay. But perhaps worst of all is how The twist ending of Joker 2 makes both this film and its predecessor a bit pointless.

    We’ll get to the twist in a moment, but Joker: Folie à Deux feels like a film at war with itself. It’s a Joker movie that ultimately isn’t really a Joker movie, and a musical that ultimately isn’t really a musical. It works backwards to try and present itself as above the genre and franchise it’s adapting, but ultimately falls flat on its face. Let’s take a look at why Joker: Folie à Deux’s biggest surprise is also its most frustrating aspect.

    Will the real Joker please stand up?

    It turns out Todd Phillips wasn’t kidding when he said Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck would never become the Clown Prince of Crime. The big twist ending of Joker: Folie à Deux is that Arthur Fleck is not, in fact, the Joker. While representing himself in court for the murders he committed in the last film, Fleck admits that the Joker persona is not really a separate personality, and that he is in fact responsible for his actions. This disillusions Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn into giving him up (she was in love with Joker, not Fleck), and leaves him sad and alone as he returns to death row once he is recaptured after someone (we never find out who ) bombed the courthouse. most of the film takes place in. The other part of the ending? Arthur Fleck is dead. Not because he was executed, but because he was murdered by the Real joker.

    Yes, really. An unnamed background inmate at Arkham (played by Connor Storrie) who has no lines until the final scene stabs Arthur repeatedly before giving himself a Glasgow smile as Arthur dies. Though it’s not said out loud, the clear idea at play here is that this prisoner Arthur kills is part of his own origin story as the future Clown Prince of Crime, making devoting two entire films to the character not a bizarre choice. . Despite the accolades, the first film was criticized for feeling like a blatant ripoff of Martin Scorsese films, especially The King of Comedy, with which it shares most of its plot (and which is a great film that you should watch if you don’t). But the counterargument from some has been that in Hollywood’s current “IP or nothing” mentality, filmmakers like Phillips who want to make character pieces have to put them into franchise vehicles, like a Joker original film, to ever get them made.

    Aside from the fact that it’s questionable how much of a “character piece” this is, with Fleck still not having that deep of a character after two films, the second film works as a tantrum in response to this situation. Whether or not Phillips said he wanted to make Joker 2, he spends the entire sequel re-litigating the last film and then sets the franchise on fire as he leaves. Nothing major happens until Fleck’s death, so what was the point of it all? Even the title, Folie à Deux, which roughly translates to “madness for two” in French, is a misnomer because Fleck and Harley’s relationship doesn’t get as much screen time as you might think. They never go out together in public like Joker and Harley, as per the marketing, as Fleck spends almost the entire film in jail. Ultimately, this twist reminds us of another famous superhero movie, one that did the whole idea much better than Folie à Deux.

    Iron Man 3 and the Mandarin Twist

    Iron Man 3 is a great film and remains one of the MCU’s best entries due to its strong directorial vision, namely the best character study of Tony Stark in the franchise, and the consistent thematic angle of critiquing the post-9/11 War on Terror fear-mongering as a function of the US military-industrial complex. To make that point, director Shane Black has reimagined Iron Man’s main enemy from the comics: The Mandarinas a sham generated by Aldrich Killian to provide a convenient cover story for his Extremis test subjects exploding repeatedly. The Mandarin was actually actor Trevor Slattery, which is hilarious after the reveal, but many comic fans were frustrated by the fake-out as they had hoped for a more accurate look at the character, especially since the trailers were heavy on Ben Kingsley’s take on the movie. role.

    I’m not here to tell the fans they were wrong for feeling that way. I like the comics too, guys. But the fact remains that of all the arch-enemies of Marvel’s greatest heroes, the Mandarin has always been the odd one out. While Doctor Doom, Magneto, Green Goblin, the Red Skull, and Loki have endured decades of comics and adaptations, the Mandarin’s racist origins as a Yellow Peril stereotype and lack of an all-time iconic story are to his credit ( although John Byrne’s Dragon Seed Saga is quite good) meant he was exactly the kind of character who could be reinterpreted in this way. It was a subversion of expectations, but it was done for a specific artistic purpose: to remove the awkward context from the Mandarin’s conception, and to make the film a critique of the cultural apparatus that supports villains like him creates to demonize other nations and ethnicities. that people are a little more receptive to the American military – or any other military – invading and occupying their country in real life.

    The revelation that Arthur is not the Joker only reads as an insult to the audience.

    Folie à Deux, on the other hand, does not have such lofty ambitions. The revelation that Arthur is not the Joker, followed by his subsequent death, only reads as an insult to the audience, an angry protest from the filmmakers that they were forced to make comic book adaptations (despite the millions they received in compensation) when they would do. prefer to make ‘real’ films. The problem, however, is that Phillips’ attempts to emulate more celebrated films in writing and cinematography are empty gestures that only further emphasize how unsuited he is to non-comedic material. The ending is dramatically unsatisfying on its own terms and fails to sell that the director would be a good fit for the type of films he’s churning out. This empty, self-loathing attitude bleeds into the rest of the film, making it one of the biggest misses of the year.

    Face the music

    Besides the twist, the other big conceit is that Folie à Deux is also a musical. Turning a Joker sequel into a jukebox musical is the kind of creative swing that could have made for a fascinating film in the right hands. Instead, Folie à Deux contains many scenes where characters do indeed sing, but the filmmaking does nothing to support them. Since Phillips doesn’t know how to film a musical, he just keeps using the faux gritty camerawork he uses in the rest of the picture, rendering the musical sequences inert as they lack the color or energy that musicals need to capture the heightened achieve an emotional tone. the genre demands.

    The film downplays its musical elements in the same way it downplays its comic book origins. Lady Gaga, one of the most popular singers in the world, got paid $12 million to star in the film, but she didn’t compose an original song for the soundtrack, nor do they get a big power ballad between the covers. Her singing is such an insignificant part of the film that she had to play a completely separate role accompanying album to get the energy out of her system. It all leads back to the question: why? Why make a Joker sequel if it would go out of its way to make itself and the previous film a waste of time? Why would you make it a musical if you wouldn’t film it that way? Why hire Lady Gaga if you’re not giving her the spotlight to sing, which is literally the main thing you hire Lady Gaga for?

    Again, it’s a matter of attitude. Folie à Deux is the latest movie musical that you don’t really want to know is a musical before you enter the cinema. Gaga even publicly said it wasn’t one on the press trip. Every genre and style that Folie à Deux throws into the blender is treated this way. It’s a comic book adaptation that doesn’t want to be a comic book adaptation, a musical that doesn’t know how to be a musical, a courtroom drama that’s too boring to work as a courtroom drama, a romance movie that doesn’t spend enough time on the romance, and a character study who forgets to give the main character enough dimension to study. It’s a film made up entirely of things it doesn’t want to be, without ever figuring out what it actually is. At a time when we’re looking forward to a new future for DC films with James Gunn’s upcoming Superman reboot, it would be in our very best interests to make films like Folie à Deux a thing of the past.

    Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can track his fixations at Tweet.

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