Sequel to Joker masterpiece is greatest disappointment of 2024

Five years since promising there would be no sequel to The Joker, Todd Phillips has delivered one – and it comes as no surprise Joker: Folie a Deux is a folly and worse, writes Leigh Paatsch.

From a dud sequel we didn’t need to a couple of old-stagers coming up with the goods, it’s a mixed bag on the big and small screen this week.

JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX (MA15+)

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie a Deux.

Director: Todd Phillips (Joker)

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson

Rating:★½

Some Jokers are not worth repeating

The original Joker, released in 2019, was an undoubted masterpiece.

Courtesy of a spectacular Oscar-winning lead performance from Joaquin Phoenix, that movie took every comic-book movie that had come before it, crumpled them all like cheap soft drink cans, and kicked the whole lot to the kerb.

At the time of release, writer-director Todd Phillips played the one-and-done card, all but promising there would never be a sequel. To dare to improve upon such perfection was an open invitation to folly, and worse.

Five years down the track, a sequel has arrived. It should therefore come as no surprise that Joker: Folie a Deux is indeed a folly and, often, far, far worse.

No major release of 2024 will be ranked as more of a major disappointment than this.

Conceptually at least, there was a faint chance Joker 2 could have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, if only due to an ambitious attempt to give viewers three movies for the price of one.

Unfortunately, no-one in their right mind would consider what is ultimately offered here to be good value.

Joker: Folie a Deux is partly a grotesquely grim prison flick.

First of all, we get a grotesquely grim prison flick, in which a clinically depressed Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) mopes about while awaiting trial for the brutal misdeeds committed by his alter ego, The Joker.

Once that ordeal is over, a mildly engrossing, but overlong and incoherent courtroom drama takes centre stage, where Arthur eventually dons his Joker makeup to handle the case himself.

Wedged between these two distinctly dull sections of the sequel is a third movie of sorts, a bizarre micro-musical that calls upon the melodic talents of Phoenix’s co-star, Lady Gaga.

She plays a conniving Joker fangirl named Lee Quinzel, who will one day later become that famously unhinged scourge of Gotham City, Ms Harley Quinn.

Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel is there only to provide musical respite from the misery dominating the rest of the picture.

For now, however, the bitsy role of Lee is there only to provide musical respite from the misery dominating the rest of the picture.

What viewers will make of Gaga’s singalong interludes will by an ear-of-the-beholder prospect, to say the very least.

Just as there will be some who will love how she tenderly tears page after page from a songbook of American classics, there will be others (particularly when Phoenix joins in for a dire duet) who will write the whole thing off as a karaoke night in hell.

Joker: Folie à Deux is in cinemas now

WOLFS (M)

Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs. Picture: Apple TV+

Rating:★★★½

Now showing on Apple TV+

It is a shame this unrelentingly charming buddy movie took a last-minute detour around a cinema release, as it is definitely one of the better crowd-pleasing flicks of 2024. All that’s being sold here is the chance to hang out with George Clooney and Brad Pitt from dusk through dawn as they put their opposing characters through their casually wisecracking paces.

They play unnamed gentlemen who specialise in a lawless field that is a lucrative, yet lonely calling. They are clean-up men, the type of can-do crooks who can take a messy situation and make all traces of the unfortunate event vanish without a trace.

While Wolfs is a throwaway movie, it is also the kind of unabashed screen entertainment you wish there was more of nowadays. Picture: Apple TV+

The action begins when our two antagonistic heroes discover they have been double-booked to deal with the same debacle. There is a body in a hotel room that needs to put somewhere else ASAP, and there is a cache of valuable illicit goods that need to be returned to its rightful owner. These are dirty jobs, and Clooney and Pitt’s hyper-cool phantoms of the night are just the kind of laid-back dudes you want to see getting those jobs done.

While this is indeed a throwaway movie, it is also the kind of unabashed screen entertainment (thanks largely to the truckloads of winning banter and bonhomie delivered by its dynamic star duo) you wish there was more of nowadays.

MEGALOPOLIS (M)

Adam Driver in Megalopolis.

Rating:★★

Selected cinemas

This here marks the realisation of a career-long dream for one of the greatest filmmakers in movie history, Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now). Tagging this sprawling, enigmatic and rather odd futuristic epic as merely a “vanity project” does not begin to scale the mountain of self-indulgence on display here. While intrepid fans undaunted by a challenging sesh at the cinema certainly won’t be bored by all the sci-fi, sex and surreal production flourishes in play, they will be absolutely baffled by what the heck it all means.

Adam Driver spearheads a large and esoteric cast list as Cesar Catilina, an architect with a vision for modern metropolitan living that hearkens straight back to the excesses of Ancient Rome. Cesar’s belief he can create the perfect city is hampered by the imperfect types who control the purse strings in his world, which include a Donald Trump-ish tycoon (Jon Voight), his Donald Trump Jr.-ish heir (Shia LaBeouf) and a ferocious femme fatale named Wow Platinum (a truly wonderful Aubrey Plaza).