Warner Bros.
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 re-teamed with Phoenix for the sequel "Joker: Folie à Deux."
Like in the original, Phoenix delivers a depressingly grounded portrait of Arthur Fleck, this time as the character awaits trial for the murders he committed in the first movie. The second time around, he also has a love interest: Lady Gaga's Lee Quinzel, a fellow inmate at Arkham Asylum who's infatuated by the headline-grabbing 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 been applauding. 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 tracking to bring in around $50 million its opening weekend at the domestic box office, a far cry from the first movie's $96 million opening weekend take, which was a record for an October release. Needless to say, it's unlikely WB will have another billion-dollar earner here.
(Still, don't feel too bad for the studio: it currently has three titles in the top 10 highest-earning movies of 2024: "Dune: Part Two," "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice," and "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.")
Here's a sampling of what critics think of "Joker: Folie à Deux," which is in theaters now.
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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 rehash the events of the first movie.
Nick Schager of The Daily Beast put it best when he compared his viewing experience to a famous show about nothing.
"'Joker: Folie à Deux' often recalls the series finale of 'Seinfeld,' insofar as it puts its main character on trial for his former misdeeds," he wrote. "It's a crime to make the DC Comics icon this lackluster, and to neuter Phoenix's live-wire scariness through endless psychoanalysis."
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From the moment the first footage of "Folie à Deux" was shown at CinemaCon in April, Phillips was coy about the sequel being a musical, promising that "it will all make sense when you see it."
For most critics, it didn't make sense.
"'Folie à Deux' simply tap dances in place for the majority of its listless runtime, stringing together a series of underwhelming musical numbers that are either too on the nose to communicate anything that Arthur couldn't express without them or too vaguely related to its characters to express anything at all," wrote IndieWire's David Ehrlich.
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 it even is a musical — like no other," he wrote.
In what could barely be considered a compliment, TIME's Stephanie Zacharek noted that the musical numbers at least had more going for them than the rest of the movie.
"The musical numbers in 'Folie à Deux' — particularly those fantasy sequences, rendered in hard-candy colors — are the liveliest thing about it, though not even they are enough to jolt the movie out of its morose lockstep," she wrote.
However, Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post, like most critics, is puzzled by Phoenix and Gaga's musical stylings.
"Phillips, who clearly dreams of working for MGM during the 1940s, somehow saw this as a logical opportunity for the pair to perform a Broadway musical's worth of songs — a good 15, all told," he wrote. "The choice brings to mind a song from 'Miss Saigon': 'Why, God, Why?'"
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Lady Gaga is one of the few performers who can convincingly hold her own opposite Phoenix's unpredictable Joker. So critics were especially disappointed that her talents were underused.
Vulture's Alison Willmore said the movie was a "waste of her presence."
"In its relentless gloom, 'Folie à Deux' plunks Gaga in a visitation booth where she tries to pretend she couldn't blow the plexiglass walls off the place with her rendition of '(They Long to Be) Close to You,'" she wrote.
But The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney points out in his review that there's a reason why Phillips doesn't have her go full Gaga.
"Since Lee is not meant to be a polished singer, Gaga tamps down her vocals into a raw, scratchy sound," he wrote. "But in the handful of scenes where fantasy liberates her in full-throated glory, the movie soars right along with her."
Regardless, Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson felt Gaga's performance was "startlingly dull."
"Her presence suggested something big and gregarious and more broadly accessible, inviting in those who were maybe alienated from Joker's grim vision of lonely straight male rage," he wrote.
"She is woefully underused, her character acting as mere emissary of Arthur's acolytes, there to prove that the attention of women is fleeting and conditional," Lawson continued. "Phillips sneers at the idea that Lee could ever truly love someone like Arthur. She ultimately comes across as a fickle creature who can't abide the real truth of a man."
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Critics pointed out that Phillips seems to relish doing the opposite of fan service at every turn, essentially burning down the goodwill he built up with fans of the first movie.
"There are plenty of scenes with Arthur dressed as Joker, defending himself in the courtroom, singing this or that chestnut, sometimes in fantasy numbers that might almost be taking place in his head. But there's no longer any danger to his presence. He's not trying to kill someone, and he's not leading a revolution. He's just singing and (on occasion) dancing his way into his Joker daydream," Variety's Owen Gleiberman wrote.
"He's a nobody," wrote BBC's Nicholas Barber of the Arthur Fleck character. "Depending on how you look at it, this demythologising exercise is either daring or it's irritatingly smug, but it's definitely not much fun. Phillips seems to be saying that if you fell for Fleck's Messianic self-image the last time around, then the joke's on you."
"With 'Folie à Deux,' Phillips gives fans a come-down that essentially punishes them for enjoying the volatile energy of the first film," TIME's Zacharek concluded. "It's more a corrective than a sequel, a Go Directly to Jail card in movie form."
