“Joker: Folie à Deux” reviews: What critics are saying about the sequel

• “Joker: Folie à Deux” opens in theaters Friday.
• Joaquin Phoenix returns to play the Joker, and Lady Gaga stars as his love interest, Harley Quinn.
• The film is panned by critics and has a score of 36% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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

As in the original, Phoenix delivers a depressing portrayal of Arthur Fleck, this time as the character awaits trial for the crimes 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 infatuated with the antics that brought Fleck infamy.

The film is part courtroom drama, part musical. Yes, you heard that right: the second Joker movie is a musical. But so far, 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 aiming to bring in around $50 million in its opening weekend at the domestic box office, a far cry from the opening weekend of the first film’s 96 millions of dollars. take, which was a record for an October release. Needless to say, WB is unlikely to make another billion dollars here.

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

Here’s a sampling of what critics are thinking about “Joker: Folie à Deux,” which is in theaters now.

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 movie or a full-on musical, but Phillips decided to have Arthur Fleck sit in a courtroom and replay 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’ often recalls the finale of ‘Seinfeld’ in that it puts its main character on trial for his past deeds,” he wrote. “It’s a crime to make the DC Comics icon so weak and neutralize Phoenix’s creepiness with endless psychoanalysis.”

“Folie à Deux” is indeed a musical – just not a good one

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

To most critics, it made no sense.

“‘Folie à Deux’ simply tap-dances in place for most of its listless running time, weaving together a series of underwhelming musical numbers that are either too on-the-nose to communicate something Arthur couldn’t express without them , or are too loosely related to them. his characters to express anything,” wrote David Ehrlich of IndieWire.

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 at all it is a musical – like no other,” he wrote.

In what could barely be considered a compliment, Stephanie Zacharek of TIME noted that the musical numbers at least had more going for them than the rest of the film.

“The musical numbers in ‘Folie à Deux’ — especially those fantasy sequences, rendered in harsh colors — are the liveliest, though even they aren’t enough to lift the film from its dreary pace,” she wrote.

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

“Phillips, clearly dreaming of working for MGM in the 1940s, somehow saw this as a logical opportunity for the pair to perform songs from a Broadway musical — a good 15, all told,” he wrote. “The choice brings to mind a song from ‘Miss Saigon’: ‘Why, God, why?'”

They shouldn’t have done Lady Gaga like that

Lady Gaga is one of the few performers who can convincingly hold her own against Phoenix’s unpredictable Joker. So critics were particularly disappointed that her talents were underutilized.

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

“In Relentless Darkness, ‘Folie à Deux’ throws Gaga into a visiting booth, where she tries to pretend she couldn’t blow up the Plexiglas walls with her rendition of ‘(They Long to Be) Close to You'” ,” she wrote.

But David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter points out in his review that there’s a reason Phillips doesn’t have her go full Gaga.

“Because Lee is not meant to be a polished singer, Gaga reduces her voice to a raw, scratchy sound,” he wrote. “But in the few scenes where the fantasy unleashes her in full glory, the film soars with her.”

Regardless, Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair found Gaga’s performance to be “surprisingly dull”.

“Her presence suggested something big and gregarious and more widely accessible, inviting to those who were perhaps alienated by the Joker’s bleak vision of lonely heterosexual male rage,” he wrote.

“She’s woefully underused, her character acting as a mere emissary of Arthur’s henchmen, there to prove that women’s attention is fleeting and conditional,” Lawson continued. “Phillips scoffs at the idea that Lee could ever truly love someone like Arthur. In the end, she comes across as a fickle creature who cannot bear the real truth of a man.”

Definitely not a fan film

Critics have pointed out that Phillips seems to enjoy doing the opposite of fan service at every turn, essentially burning away the goodwill he built up with fans of the first film.

“There are a lot of scenes with Arthur dressed as the Joker, appearing in the courtroom, singing this or that chestnut, sometimes in fantasy numbers that could almost be taking place 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 (sometimes) dancing in the Joker’s dream,” Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote.

“He’s a nobody,” wrote the BBC’s Nicholas Barber of the character Arthur Fleck. “Depending on how you look at it, this exercise in demystification is either bold or irritatingly presumptuous, but it’s certainly not much fun. Phillips seems to be saying that if you last fell for Fleck’s messianic self-image, then the joke’s on you.”

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