Joker: Folie à Deux review – Lady Gaga electrifies in mediocre musical sequel

Love is in the air for Joaquin Phoenix’s clown prince of chaos in this bold but indulgent comic book musical – lifted by Gaga’s weapons-grade charisma

Is Todd Phillips trolling us? For the sequel to his divisive but wildly successful double Oscar-winning 2019 picture, Phillips tears up the formula. The gritty panache of Joker’s “making of a murderer” narrative and the subsequent extravagantly violent crime spree is replaced by two hours and 20 minutes of a musical romance/courtroom drama mashup. Oh, and there’s also a Looney Tunes-style animated prologue created by The Triplets of Belleville director Sylvain Chomet. The influences of the first film – few movies have borrowed so obviously and profligately from Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy – are largely discarded. Joker: Folie à Deux, which features Lady Gaga alongside returning star Joaquin Phoenix, draws instead from pictures such as Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart and Scorsese’s New York, New York – both musicals and, it’s worth mentioning, both notorious flops.

It’s a bold, if potentially uncommercial decision: the comic book musical is an underpopulated genre, for good reason. Comic book musicals in which one of the lead actors can barely carry a tune (Phoenix’s Joker sings in much the same way he laughs, sinewy, strained and painfully, as if every note is being kicked out of him) are an even rarer beast. But while the song and dance element might be a stumbling block for some of the first film’s existing fanbase, it’s not the main issue here. For all the standard-mangling assaults on classic songs (Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered gets a particularly tone-deaf mauling), the idea of a musical as the delusional fantasy of a broken mind works rather well at times. The problem is that, for all the audacious changes in approach, there’s very little that’s new here.

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