Why fans are hating Joker: Folie à Deux (but loving The Penguin series on HBO)

Joker: Folie à Deux is out now in theaters, and the consensus online is that it's awful. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 34% rotten rating among critics and 39% among audiences. Preview screenings took in about half the money the original Joker movie made in 2019. That's quite a fall from the first film, which was liked by critics, loved by audiences, and made over a billion dollars at the box office.

What happened? Simply put, the new movie isn't as good as the old. It doesn't have as much focus. There's a love story featuring Lady Gaga as a hastily sketched Harley Quinn, a slice-of-life prison drama, a courtroom drama, and — at the 11th hour — an action movie, although the action seems to come out of nowhere. Also, the movie is a musical and a lot of people don't seem to like that on principle. As a one-star Rotten Tomatoes review puts it, "Its a musical, musical's suck."

I think Folie à Deux is intermittently successful at everything it tries, which makes for an uneven viewing experience. But what I think offended people most is what the film does with its central character. 2019's Joker took Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) on a journey from being a maladjusted loser to a giddy agent of chaos, and a lot of people were laughing maniacally right along with him. Folie à Deux takes him down several notches; he's again a hapless loser, and instead of building him back into the Joker again, this time the movie leaves him there.

Joker: Folie à Deux seems completely uninterested in moving the story of the first film forward, instead bringing back characters to recap what happened and having Arthur sees flashes of earlier scenes. I understand why this is unsatisfying to a lot of people; they came to see what the Joker did next and instead saw Arthur Fleck regress. And they had to endure Joaquin Phoenix's ragged singing voice on top of it.

At the same time, I respect director Todd Phillips for doing something different. He didn't tell a story about the Joker becoming more powerful and spreading chaos, which is what people wanted and expected, but a story about a mentally ill man collapsing in on himself. It's almost like he's throwing the audience's expectations back in their faces. IndieWire called the movie "blockbuster filmmaking as a form of collective punishment."

But I also can't blame anyone who saw the movie and walked out angry, because who the hell sees a blockbuster movie to be punished? They go be entertained, and Joker: Folie à Deux doesn't have much interest in entertaining them. If this wasn't a Batman spinoff, if it didn't star an iconic character who came with expectations attached, if it didn't cost $200 million to make, Folie à Deux might be seen as an interesting cinematic experiment in trying to get audiences to reexamine their beliefs; why were they so compelled by Arthur's murder spree in the first movie? Isn't he getting what he deserves now? Why are we so bloodthirsty?

But this movie is a Batman spinoff, it does star an iconic character, and it did cost $200 million to make. So stop trying to be clever and give me blood.

Joker: Folie à Deux vs The Penguin

I'm being a bit flippant above; honestly, I wonder if people will reassess Folie à Deux in a few years after we're over the shock of it zigging so hard when everyone expected it to zag. The current wall of negative press feels like a pile-on, not a sober assessment of the movie's strengths and weaknesses. Folie à Deux did not successfully navigate the network of expectations put upon it by fans of the first movie and fans of Batman — that much is obvious — but I like that it swung big. And if nothing else, the cinematography by Lawrence Sher is luminously beautiful.

As it happens, there's another Batman spinoff running right now that's pleasing people a lot more: The Penguin, a new miniseries airing on HBO and Max. The Penguin is similar enough to Joker: Folie à Deux for the differences to be interesting. They both revolve around excellent performances from lead actors playing Batman villains: Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker and Colin Farrell as the Penguin. They both exist within the Batman universe but seem embarrassed about it. Batman himself is nowhere to be seen in either project, and both change the names of characters so they don't sound as outlandish. Folie à Deux can't quite bring itself to give Harley Quinn her full name from the comics: Harleen Quinzel. Too goofy, I guess, too wink-wink-nudge-nudge; she's named Lee Quinzel instead. Likewise, The Penguin shortens the title character's given name from Oswald Cobblepot to Oswald Cobb. "That small change of the name allowed us to look at this character in a grounded way," said producer Dylan Clark.

In both cases, there's a sense of "don't associate me with goofy comic book movies, this is serious drama." But while Folie à Deux colors way outside the lines of the superhero genre, The Penguin stays within bounds; it's a serious comic book show, but it's still a comic book show. In that way it's more like the first Joker film, which channeled old Martin Scorsese movies like Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy but with a Batman finish. Likewise, The Penguin takes a ton of inspiration from HBO's influential mafia drama The Sopranos, but it's set in Gotham City rather than New Jersey.

Once upon a time, you could tell original stories like Taxi Driver and The Sopranos and have a decent chance of finding an appreciative audience. Nowadays, if you want to explore those kinds of muddy themes, it helps to attach yourself to a big IP. Enter Batman. Maybe that's what Joker director Todd Phillips is rebelling against in Folie à Deux. He has things he's like to say about the media, about corruption, about the justice system, about celebrity, but everyone just wants him to tee off the Joker's next adventure. Well, fine; he'll give them a movie they'll never see coming.

That feels like a selfish approach to filmmaking; if the movie cost $200 million to make, I expect it to prioritize entertaining an audience. But there's also something charmingly punk rock about that approach; at least it's bold and memorable. But I also understand why it could be a let-down. The Penguin is bold too, but never so much that it loses its audience. It's a better viewing experience than Folie à Deux, but not more daring.

I appreciate what both of these projects bring to the table. We've been getting deluged with movies and TV shows about superheroes for well over a decade now, and both The Penguin and Joker: Folie à Deux prove there are still ways to get us talking about it. In art, the enemy of the good isn't always the bad: it's the boring, and I am not bored right now by what DC is putting on my screen. That's worth more than a little.

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