davidehrlich’s review published on Letterboxd:
It would seem that Todd Phillips has not taken kindly to the notion that his mega-grossing, Oscar-winning, career-defining “Joker” was some kind of incel rallying cry. (Remember when SWAT teams were on standby for the film’s New York premiere, just in case anyone in the audience felt a bit too empowered by the movie’s themes?) To Phillips’ mind, his comic book-fueled Scorsese homage was a sad clown story about the cruelty of our unempathetic world, told through the eyes of a man who’d been violently denied the love we all need to suffer through it.
Yes, “Joker” ended with Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck shooting his favorite talk show host on live TV, the murder sparking a copycat riot that saw a mob of angry Gothamites set fire to the city in Arthur’s image, but the director would argue that rage fantasies aren’t endorsements, even in a semi-triumphant blockbuster that seduced multiplex audiences to share in their catharsis. It’s just entertainment, after all, and Phillips doesn’t feel he should be held responsible for a world too sick to separate fiction from reality.
As someone who believes that “The Hangover” sequels are the only truly evil things Phillips has ever made, and maintains that “Joker” was less dangerous for the ambivalence of its morals than it was for the obviousness of its success (my 2019 review was preoccupied with the semi-genuine fear that Hollywood would be inspired to costume the rest of its output in comic book lore), I was mostly annoyed that Phillips wanted to have his cake and eat it too. In that light, I suppose I should be delighted that his inevitable follow-up is so eager to vomit that same cake back up all over the screen — all over his fans and his critics alike. It must have been making Phillips sick to his stomach, because “Joker: Folie à Deux” is nothing if not a full-throated repudiation of the idea that its “hero” should be embraced as a symbol instead of pitied (or hugged) as a man.
So how does Phillips reconcile Joker with Arthur Fleck? How does he wrestle his misunderstood character study away from the idea that it wasn’t first and foremost a work of mass entertainment? With an excruciatingly — perhaps even deliberately — boring sequel that does everything in its power not to amuse you.
At a time when everything is consumed as entertainment, no matter how tragic, Phillips has created a corporate pop spectacle that all but demands to be seen as something else. Here is a movie that perversely denies audiences everything they’ve been conditioned to want from it; gently at first, and then later with the unmistakable hostility of a knife to the gut. And that, more than anything else, is why “Folie à Deux” adopts the form of a classic musical: Because no other genre makes it so easy to appreciate all the fun you’re not having. This is blockbuster filmmaking as a form of collective punishment, but unlike “Borderlands,” “Deadpool,” and so much else of what Hollywood has pumped into theaters this year, “Folie à Deux” doesn’t feel like it ever intended to be anything else.
It’s an admittedly unexpected gambit, and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t admire the audacity Phillips displays by following all the way through with it (or accidentally backing into it, as the case might have been). Once again, Phillips has made a movie that Joker himself would probably approve of. This time, however, I’m much less convinced that other people will share the same enthusiasm for it. At no point does Phillips’ pleasure-denying concept become sophisticated or rewarding enough to justify the agony of sitting through it.