Joker 2 has been getting beaten up by the press all week. But is it actually the best movie of the year?
Genre: Superhero/Drama/Musical
Premise: As Arthur Dent, aka The Joker, awaits trial, he meets a woman in his prison music class who may be just as crazy as he is.
About: Joker: Folie a Deux hit theaters this week and managed to make just 40 million dollars. For comparison, the first Joker made 96 million dollars on its opening weekend. It’s a very concerning number not only for this movie, but for Hollywood in general. Joker was the freshest take on a superhero movie in a decade. For audiences to cool on that take so quickly leaves very few avenues for a still-superhero-dependent studio system going forward.
Writer: Scott Silver and Todd Phillips
Details: 2 hours 18 minutes
Arthur Fleck currently resides in Arkham Prison (or the insane asylum wing of the prison?), where he’s awaiting trial for the five murders he committed in the first film. Arthur lives a fairly mundane existence in lock-up but as least he’s a celebrity. People are always asking him to tell a joke. It helps that they made a TV movie about his murders and it became, unlike this film, a big hit.
While Arthur awaits his trial, the head guard, who’s a friend of Arthur’s, signs him up for a prison music class, and that’s where he meets Harley Quinn, who’s a big fan of Arthur’s. The two fall for each other immediately and when they meet in the class a few days later, Harley covertly sets a fire in the room so they can escape and hang out alone for a while.
Meanwhile, Arthur’s lawyer keeps reminding him how important the trial is, telling him that he must disavow his Joker personality. If he can convince the judge that that version of himself is a lie, is a thing that takes over his body, then he will not be convicted for murder. Arthur acts like he understands but with Arthur, you never know. At no point are all the lights on in Arthur’s attic.
When the trial finally starts, it’s a circus. Everyone wants to be a part of it. Harley, who has since checked herself out of the asylum, is Arthur’s biggest fan. She’s there every single day. But when she sees Arhtur’s lawyer holding him back, she implores him to ditch her. Arthur does and, the next day, shows up to represent himself… as the Joker. What could possibly go wrong?
People are going to tell you this movie is terrible. It isn’t.
Joker 2 is too unique of an experience to be terrible.
When you make a hit movie inside a major franchise, what does every sequel do? They go BIGGER. Right? Bigger set pieces. Bigger effects. Bigger freaking story! And if I’m being completely honest, I would’ve liked to see that. I would’ve loved to see Todd Phillips’ version of Batman. And it didn’t have to be some big story with heists or anything like that. But some conflict with Batman? I would’ve been in.
Phillips eschewed that and, at least from my untrained filmmaking eye, kept things small like the first. Who does that in this day and age? Nobody! Everybody takes the bait. Go bigger, harder, faster! Phillips understands that in the history of sequels going bigger has worked like three times. People liked the first film cause it was simple. So why not keep the second one simple?
Of course, none of that matters if the script doesn’t work.
So, did it?
As I sat there watching Joker 2, I asked that question a lot. I loved the first 30 minutes. Normally, when a script is a slow burn, it’s fast boredom. But this wasn’t that. Getting to know Arthur’s life inside the prison was sad yet unexpectedly sweet. The guards aren’t mean to him. They’re friendly and often joke around with Arthur.
Things lift up when Arthur meets Harley. You can see that this changes Arthur. It’s his first time experiencing real love and he (and we) can’t wait to see them together.
But as the movie went on, I found myself getting bored. I asked myself, “What’s powering the narrative here?” By ‘powering the narrative’ I mean, what’s making us want to keep watching? If I was watching this at home, what are the things that are going to prevent me from turning the movie off and watching Love Island instead?
There were two arguments to be made.
Number 1 was the conclusion of the trial. Theoretically, we wanted to see if Arthur won or lost the trial.
Number 2 was, would he and Harley end up together?
From a screenwriting perspective, these are both strong story engines. They *should* be able to power a story if done well.
Unfortunately, neither worked. Each had their moments. But neither engine could sustain itself. They would constantly peter out, requiring a jump.
With the trial, I think the thing that kept it from working was the stakes. The script never made it clear what would happen if Arthur won. We knew what happened if he lost. He remained in prison. But if he won… well, they never mentioned anything about it if he won. And that’s because they knew that if they told the audience the truth – that he heads to the insane asylum – that it was really no different than if he lost.
So what they did was they never mentioned it HOPING that we would think, hmmm, maybe if Arthur wins, he goes free!
We screenwriters think we’re so slick. That we can dance around these holes. But the truth is we can’t. If the audience doesn’t know what the exact value of obtaining the goal is, they’re going to feel a vagueness while they watch the film. They won’t know why something feels off. They’ll just know they’re not as invested.
But Phillips and Silver were smart. They added a second engine just in case the first one didn’t work. I’ve told writers to do this before. Two engines is better than one. Heck, on an airplane, it’s the difference between landing and crashing into a mountain should one engine flame out.
The second engine is this love story. But I’m sad to report, that didn’t work either. I enjoyed their meet cute scene. I enjoyed a couple of their dance numbers (the tap dancing one was my favorite – the one upbeat number in the film). But the problem is… there was no conflict between them. They both instantly liked each other. So the sum of their interactions was never interesting.
I suppose you can make the Titanic argument here – that the entertainment value of their relationship was not determined by the conflict between them, but rather by the conflict surrounding them. And, yeah, we genuinely don’t know if they’ll end up together. So that’s a reason to keep watching.
But I didn’t care. Something about them wasn’t interesting enough for me to care whether they got together or not.
That left me with little reason to watch.
But there was a third reason the story didn’t work. And it’s something we don’t talk about a lot on the site. It’s what I call, “Script Muck.” Script Muck is half a scene here, a stale subplot there, staying in one section of the script too long there. It is the accumulation of all the things you could’ve cut but didn’t. When you cut those things, the script moves faster. Less boring parts = stronger audience attention.
I’ll give you a prime example of some script muck that should’ve been cut. When we finally get to the courtroom section (over halfway through the film), Arthur starts the case with his lawyer. We get 2-3 long scenes in the courtroom with that lawyer before Arthur finally says, “I’m done with this! I want to represent myself!” And he changes from Arthur into The Joker, which injects the script with some much needed energy.
Why not start the courtroom stuff with Arthur already representing himself? The courtroom scenes were so slow before that. They were script muck. And I know the answer Phillips would give you. He would say that it’s a much more dramatic reveal if we’ve been in court for a while. But dude, it’s not necessary. You could’ve sliced off 10-15 minutes there alone.
I first became worried about this movie when it got a 7 minute standing ovation at Cannes. Not because 7 minutes was less minutes than other standing ovations at the festival. But because the French gave an ovation to it in the first place! If the French like a film, it’s probably terrible.
But then I got worried in the lead-up to the release when I saw that NOBODY was doing press for the film! A major studio production sequel to a big hit and nobody’s out there promoting it?!? That’s straight-up weird. Even worse, the one interview Phillips did, the only soundbite that came out of it was, “I’m done with this franchise.” That doesn’t exactly make me want to run out to the theater. Sheesh.
I guess people were right when they said nobody asked for this sequel. But I still think that if they had made a good movie, people would’ve come out in droves. Or not. I guess we’ll never know!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: (MAJOR SPOILERS) I saw that this movie got a D CinemaScore. Which is REALLY BAD. But it doesn’t always mean that the movie itself was bad. It means that something happened in the movie that the audience hated. No doubt they were responding to Arthur being killed at the end. This same thing happened with Uncut Gems, when Adam Sandler was killed in the end. That got a D CinemaScore as well, and that movie is a masterpiece. But the lesson here is that the large majority of audiences don’t like when you kill your main character off in the end. You get “cool” points from cinephiles and elder statesman critics and industry folks who love when writers have the balls to say “F Hollywood.” But if you want to write a movie that people actually enjoy, don’t kill your protagonist off at the end.
