Joker: Folie à Deux

I have to assume that Joker 2: Folie à Deux lacked what audiences loved about Todd Phillip’s first Joker film. The assumption is necessary, because I didn’t like the first film either. I found the breathless discourse about the earlier movie as ridiculous as most normal people did. But I was put off by its “don’t cut yourself on my edge” ethos, which was—truthfully—a bit boring.

This one, though. This one, though. There is always a recency bias when dealing superlatively, but I haven’t come up with a more frustrating movie than Folie à Deux since seeing it in the theater. Don’t call its narrative difficult. Don’t call its genre bending unbounded. Don’t call its refusal of expectations an creative choice by cinematic auteur. Audiences should refuse back, because every one of these decisions is, today, precisely what makes this film so uncreative.

Folie à Deux bets all of its chips on genre bending as interesting and subverting expectations as radical. It begs the audience to audience to accept. But folks. It is 2024. These are a few trailers that showed before Joker:

• Kraven the Hunter. A Marvel movie that is also an R-rated, violent revenge film.
• Red One. A Christmas Santa-Claus movie that is also an action movie that is also a comedy movie and that is also clearly following the Marvel formula.
• Venom: The Last Dance. A superhero movie that (whoa guys) isn’t a Marvel film. This one’s dark.

Folie à Deux, blending genres like the musical, the psychological thriller, and–again!–the superhero movie, pleads with viewers to accept that it is novel, radical, different.

The problem is, it’s not. Today, the genre-bent movie is the dominant genre. Subverted expectations is the primary expectation of audiences. For crying out loud, M. Knight Shyamalan now regularly doesn’t put twists or ambiguity into his movies, which is more surprising than if he had.

The remainder of Folie à Deux, beyond its undelivered-upon demands on the audience, is boringly offensive and offensively boring. It would honestly have been more surprising if this film had, after the first Joker, just done the most normative superhero movie possible. I’m talking spandex. I’m talking costumes with nipples, for some reason. I’m talking Zoinks! Boom! Pow! All of this would have been more interesting and, at this point, somehow more original than Folie à Deux.

Let’s stop making “wouldn’t it be weird/cool/interesting if…” movies. Good ones are good enough.