Joker: Folie à Deux

Todd Phillips's exruciating sequel to his hit reimagining of DC's Joker was considered one of the year's worst films. Rightly so, it's terrible. There's been speculation that Phillips took $200 million of Warner Brothers' money and made a nearly unwatchable movie with it just out of spite (how Joker!). That reading feels a bit like the invention of auteurist apologists. Phillips seems to be doing little more than lashing out at everyone who embraced or rejected his first Joker movie for "the wrong reasons."

Joaquin Phoenix returns as Arthur Fleck, the pathetic, bullied loner who developed an alter ego and went on a killing spree in the first picture. Now, Fleck, AKA Joker, must stand trial for those crimes. At his side is another inmate of Arkham State Hospital, Harley "Lee" Quinzel (Lady Gaga), who admires Joker and his crimes of poetic justice. As their romance develops, they fantasize about their future life as an All That Jazz-style musical starring them.

Whoever Joker was intended to alienate, it certainly possesses a near-perfect compilation of things I dislike about modern cinema—comic book source material, a generic writer/director elevated to auteur status and invited to make anything he wants, empty trauma fetishization with nothing new to say about trauma, and the contemporary treatment of a movie musical in which all the songs and half-songs are either whispered or staged as truncated production numbers that seem to terrified to go on long enough to register as actual production numbers. Philips' first Joker may have been shamelessly derivative of Martine Scorsese's Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, but at least that was interesting to look at. This sequel is basically the least compelling courtroom drama ever envisioned, occasionally broken up with musical sequences that are abruptly stopped just as they're starting to hint at how dazzling they could be if they wanted.