Joker: Folie A Deux (2024) Relax, beloved BQ visitors.....we promise you'll read not one more laborious plot description of this film, followed by a flood of adjectives like 'boring', 'repetitive', 'tiresome', 'what the hell were they thinking?'....yada, yada.
Yawn.
Let's just break it down to a damage evaluation.....
The musical stuff.....We don't know of any successful musical whose advance marketing tried to hide the fact it's a musical. That's strike one. Strike two: the musical numbers themselves are staged with a mish-mash of jarring styles. Sometimes the singing occurs within actual scenes, sometimes it's staged as deliberate fantasy dreams, sometimes a clumsy mixture of both. Strike three: why the heavy reliance on singing anyway? The Joker thinks he's Rodney Dangerfield, not Frank Sinatra.
The Bait 'n Switch Trailer Not that we blame Warner Brothers for crafting a trailer promising a bigger, better, even more outrageous version of the first film. They're all about putting asses in seats, even if it means turning into snake-oil salesmen......even if it bites them in the ass once audiences get a look at the actual movie. But this time they unwisely pulled a double-whammy con job, covering up the musical numbers as well as the film's 360 degree detour into depressing, tragic, psychological introspection.
So not only did WB and director-co-screenwriter Todd Phillips serve up a completely different movie than what audiences expected, they served up a crappy version of the different movie they were attempting to make.
The "F*** you!" to the incel fanboys who turned the first film into a giant hit. We think we get what 'Folie A Deux tried to do.....teach us a moral lesson and shame us for the sin of cheering on the Joker as he unleashed hell on those who abused and insulted him.The film reveals him as a lonely introvert starved for affection.....a lost soul who deluded himself into thinking he'd gone mad simply because he used grotesque cosplay to release his inner Id. Most cruelly of all, the girl he mistook for a soulmate turns out as nothing but a groupie attracted to nihilism and chaos.
There's nothing wrong with this premise at all. But Todd Phillips wanted it both ways.....to shake his finger at us for finding Joker entertaining and still attract crowds by squandering 200 million dollars to hide his message inside what resembles a tentpole spectacle.
Ticket buyers gave him what he richly deserved.....they spent their money elsewhere.
And David Zaslav, the reptile in charge of Warners, would have probably made more money if he'd released "Batgirl" and "Coyote Vs. Acme", the fully completed movies he flushed into oblivion for tax writeoffs.
The Lizard Of Oz flushed the wrong movie.....for 'Joker: Folie A Deux', Zero stars (0).
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