Joker: Folie à Deux review - supervillainy laid low

“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps why not everyone in Hollywood has agreed with the hotcake thing. 

Queasy marketeers have often underestimated the likely box office of mad-killer pics – from Psycho (1960) through The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and then on to Todd Phillips’s Joker, which was also seen as a bit of a gamble by its studio in 2019.

The Warner Bros sequel to that surprise serrated smash is now with us, but as follies go Folie à Deux is dull and underwhelming, largely because its Batman-world supervillain is sat upon by a load of prison warders for much of the film. It’s as though Hannibal Lecter got eaten himself by the prison governor.

Phillips is again director and Joaquin Phoenix is again Joker. (The definite article is troublesome in movies from DC comics: we’re now supposed to say “The Batman” but no longer “The Joker”.) We join Joker in Gotham City’s grim Arkham Prison awaiting trial for his blood-letting in the earlier film, and his liberal lawyer (Catherine Keener) is going for a childhood trauma defence – “another person” inside him did the killings, she claims. This doesn’t set up much tension over whether he’s likely to be let off by a court, and instead we wait for a jail break that will enable him (and us) to enjoy a new crime spree.

Likely salvation comes in the form of Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), the embryonic supervillain Harley Quinn, who has wound up in a lower-security wing of the prison with the intention of becoming a Joker groupie. But a very controlling groupie. When not being tranquillised and brutalised by the prison guards (led by Brendan Gleeson), Joker is rigorously schooled in the art of love and becoming his old self again by Lee, during improbable moments when they’re thrown together in the slammer. We wait in vain, however, for the definitive jail break: Joker is only to taste freedom in two short interludes.

Instead, the movie’s second act revolves around Joker’s trial in which he’s allowed to don his old clown togs and makeup and turn the proceeding into something close to a (yet more improbable) circus. Characters from the 2019 instalment (played by Zazie Beetz and Leigh Gill) appear as witnesses to remind us of the terror that Arthur Fleck, as he is known for most of the film, visited on them.

Amid a sadly sketchy script by Phillips and Scott Silver, song and occasional dance are perhaps the movie’s principal selling point. Both Arthur and Lee are fans of the classic popular songbook – from “Get Happy” and “That’s Entertainment!” to “(They Long to Be) Close to You” and “For Once in My Life” – which are delivered by the duo more or less in time to doomy, bent-backwards orchestrations. Arthur fantasises that he and Lee appear in a TV spectacular called The Joker and Harley Show. Phillips, though, displays no great skills as a realiser of musical theatre.

The director’s first Joker film was a Scorsese-influenced, facetiously sick serial-killer saga, as jerky on its feet as Joaquin Phoenix’s menacing shoe-shuffles across Gotham’s savage streets. It was a mix of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, climaxing with Robert De Niro’s talk-show host being shot to death on live TV. (Perhaps, given the number old songs, this new film has distant breezes from Dennis Potter’s chirpily warped Pennies From Heaven.)

Phoenix won an Oscar for his earlier incarnation and he’s equally good here, bearing a sunken body and face, his antic mouth forever in discord with dark, brow-buried eyes. His emaciated frame reminds us that he’s really a puny kid who wants to be a pop star. Actual pop star Lady Gaga has less of a journey as an empowered acolyte, and she’s enough of an accomplished actor not to have needed singing sequences to lure her onto the project. (Harley Quinn was certainly more submissive in her bad romance with the Joker in the old comic books: in one of them he threw her out of a window just to see if she’d survive.)

Hitchcock, Kubrick and Scorsese had the sense to intellectualise psychopaths – which, paradoxically, can create space for us to laugh at them (think of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas). But former comedy specialist Todd Phillips doesn’t have quite that intellectual distance and grows curiously empathetic towards his put-upon anti-hero, which drains the new film of wit.

Yet he knows there’s something perverse about a public that reveres criminals, like the crowd of Joker lookalikes who gather supportively outside his court date. Once we’d never have believed that so many could cheer on such an obvious felon. In today’s world, that’s no longer a kind of joke.