Even Lady Gaga can’t save this movie.

In 2019, a yr now separated from us by sufficient catastrophic world occasions to really feel like a distant archaeological period, the film Joker, prefer it or not (I definitely didn’t), was a giant deal. It gained the Golden Lion on the Venice Movie Pageant and later garnered a number one 11 Oscar nominations, together with Greatest Image, with star Joaquin Phoenix finally profitable Greatest Actor for his efficiency as a mentally unwell would-be stand-up comedian turned murderous clown. The film additionally turned the topic of heated dialogue and never a bit hand-wringing. Would its portrait of the comic-book villain because the lonely, misunderstood sufferer of mistreatment by a vaguely outlined “society” encourage copycat acts of mayhem? Joker might have teetered uneasily within the stability between critiquing incel violence and being a industrial for it, however fortunately its many admirers stored their enthusiasm contained to the field workplace, the place the movie raked in over a billion {dollars} worldwide, shattering the all-time file for an R-rated film.

5 years later, Joker’s director and co-writer Todd Phillips has returned with a sequel that swerves in an unseen—and on paper, intriguing—new path: Our depressing antihero has grow to be, of all issues, the singing, dancing protagonist in his personal non-public musical. A number of issues may very well be mentioned about Phillips’ execution of that concept, most of them deservedly unfavorable. By any affordable measure this can be a horrible film, too lengthy and too self-serious and approach too dramatically inert, a regrettable waste of its lead actors’ boundless dedication to even their most thinly written roles. However nobody might accuse Joker: Folie à Deux of being a mere money seize, lazily recycling its predecessor’s temper, themes, or plot construction.

There’s an admirable boldness to Phillips’ determination to solid a pop supernova like Woman Gaga reverse the darkly charismatic Phoenix, then ask them each to sing, live-to-film, a jukebox-musical soundtrack of greater than a dozen well-known songs that vary from Forties Broadway requirements (“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” from Pal Joey) to Nineteen Seventies easy-listening pop (the Carpenters’ “Near You”). Granted, the director fails to clear the bar he units for himself—fails laborious sufficient, at occasions, to scrape the pores and skin off his legs from knee to ankle—nevertheless it’s truthful to say that this film’s issues have little if something to do with the tried magic trick of its premise. It’s primarily the weirdness of that trick, and the celebs’ doomed dedication to pulling it off, that renders Joker: Folie à Deux even minimally watchable.

Joker ended with Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck locked up in a psychological establishment however seemingly on the verge of escaping to begin his profession as Batman’s archnemesis. As an alternative, Folie à Deux finds Arthur nonetheless locked up in Gotham Metropolis’s inhumane Arkham State Hospital. Having been judged competent in a sanity listening to, Arthur is about to go on trial for the murders of 5 individuals, one in all them on stay tv. (As he confesses to extra individuals than he in all probability ought to, the quantity is basically six in the event you embrace his mom.) Exterior the establishment’s dirty partitions, he has grow to be a folks hero to a sure set of clown-mask-sporting nihilists and a tabloid bogeyman to the general public at massive. However contained in the hospital, Arthur stays a pitiable loser, mocked by his fellow inmates and singled out for alternately pleasant and merciless therapy by an Irish jail guard (Brendan Gleeson).

Phillips’ want to mess with the viewers’s style expectations is obvious from the soar. The very first thing the viewers sees, after a classic WB brand, is a cartoon brief entitled “Me and My Shadow,” animated by the Triplets of Belleville filmmaker Sylvain Chomet in a mode harking back to traditional Looney Tunes. In it, Arthur’s shadow self emerges from his physique to commit crimes that the actual man is then blamed for. The plot of the cartoon is a literalization of the protection that his sympathetic lawyer (Catherine Keener) will later use in courtroom: Arthur, she believes, is the sufferer of dissociative id dysfunction, a former abused little one who’s made up the Joker character as a option to vent his in any other case inaccessible rage. It’s not clear whether or not the film desires us to agree along with her evaluation or with that of Gotham assistant district legal professional Harvey Dent (Business’s Harry Lawtey), who thinks Arthur is merely a sociopath faking psychological sickness so as to escape the implications he deserves.

In the meantime, Lee Quinzel (Gaga), an arsonist serving time in Arkham’s minimum-security wing, has a really completely different imaginative and prescient of the Joker: She’s a groupie, having adopted his crime spree within the information and obsessively rewatched a TV biopic about him. (Even followers who haven’t consumed the aggressive advertising and marketing gained’t take lengthy to acknowledge her as the long run Harley Quinn.) Once they’re put in the identical music-therapy group—a spot the place cheery sing-alongs are touted as a healthful counterpoint to the grimness of asylum life—Lee and Arthur bond immediately and shortly develop their very own extra twisted motives for bursting into track. Once they’re collectively, or aside and pondering of one another, their inside monologues bubble to the floor as ready-made classics of the American songbook. This even if Lee, for her half, appears to not be a giant fan of the musical style. When the asylum exhibits the MGM traditional The Band Wagon on film night time, Lee will get so bored she units hearth to the rec-room piano. Not liking The Band Wagon ought to certainly function a purple flag for any potential suitor, however Lee redeems her style in a while, when the by-then-besotted couple belts out a canopy of that musical’s most enduring quantity, “That’s Leisure.”

Joker: Folie à Deux is hardly the primary musical to posit the thought of its song-and-dance sequences because the emanations of a delusional thoughts, nevertheless it have to be among the many ones that hammer hardest on that conceit. In scene after scene, typically with hardly a break for dialogue in between, both Lee, Arthur, or each in unison will channel the depth of an emotional second by delivering a breathy model of some beloved pop hit or different. Invisible string orchestras might swoop in to accompany these flights of fancy, simply as they’d in a Hollywood musical, however the secondary characters by no means take part and infrequently appear to note {that a} serenade is going down. With uncommon exceptions (just like the rock-’em-sock-’em Gaga cowl of “That’s Life” that performs below the closing credit), many of the vocal performances in Folie à Deux are purposely underwhelming by way of virtuosity: They’re husky, scratchy, and in Phoenix’s case typically half-spoken, suited extra for a tipsy karaoke night time than for the Broadway stage.

Gaga has identified in interviews that neither her nor Phoenix’s character is an expert entertainer, so why ought to they sing like one? It’s an affordable level, as is a much less well mannered one she doesn’t make: that if she sang full-out as a substitute of curbing her normal vocal splendor, the distinction would place Phoenix’s ample however restricted baritone in unflattering reduction. However what makes the songs, irresistible toe-tappers all, begin to blur into a colorless wall of sound has much less to do with the efficiency high quality than with the nonstop onslaught of musical numbers and the sluggishness of the story in between. Apart from the constructing of inside emotion to the purpose that it should categorical itself in track—again and again and over—valuable little occurs in Folie à Deux. Arthur is said match to face trial, goes to courtroom, and is marched again by the merciless guards every night time to the bleakness of his cell. A number of acquainted characters from the primary Joker, together with Zazie Beetz as Arthur’s former neighbor, present as much as take the stand, and at one level a horrific act of violence interrupts the proceedings. However the ahead movement of the story is so minimal, and so damaged up by lengthy stretches of musical stasis, that the outcome barely seems like a film. It’s extra like a piece of Joker fanfic, created not simply by the credited screenwriters (Phillips and Scott Silver, who additionally co-wrote the 2019 movie) however by Phoenix and Gaga themselves in what was apparently a collaborative challenge to revise the script in actual time through the shoot.

The truth that Folie à Deux has the self-referential high quality of fanfic doesn’t essentially imply it can go down effectively with precise Joker followers, who appear prone to come out scratching their heads over a sequel a few comic-book supervillain that comprises nearly no battle scenes, a single automotive chase that ends roughly a minute after it begins, and scarcely a second that may very well be categorized as suspenseful. The principle query to be answered by the viewer just isn’t “What is going to occur subsequent?” however “Is all this going down in the actual world, or simply inside their heads?”—an epistemological puzzle that isn’t sufficient in itself to maintain our power for practically two hours and 20 minutes. Much more confoundingly, all this time spent locked within the psyches of two deeply disturbed characters provides us little perception into their motivations. The pathetic Arthur Fleck stays, as I known as him in my overview of the 2019 film, a “poor little clownsie-wownsie,” whereas Gaga’s Lee is so underwritten we stay uncertain to the top whether or not she is a susceptible fangirl or a heartless femme fatale. If he’s, because the lyric from “That’s Leisure” goes, “the clown together with his pants falling down,” does that make her merely “the skirt who’s doing him dust”? To make Gaga’s character little greater than a mirror that displays the Joker again to himself (in alternately flattering and unflattering methods) is an actual squandering of this powerhouse performer, whose life expertise as a stadium-filling famous person has given her no scarcity of perception into the psychology of fame monsters.

With out spoiling the ending, it’s secure to say that with it, Phillips appears to foreclose the probability that anybody will likely be begging for extra. That’s in all probability a blessing for each the filmmaker and us, since this somber, muddled, maudlin movie appears to have been made by somebody who holds his characters and his viewers in contempt.