Film release: October 2, 2024
JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX
USA / 2024
Written and directed by Todd Phillips
Mit: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga ua
And the killer sings and dances…
It’s the usual. “Joker” was simply too successful in 2019 to let the matter rest. So now, five years later, the sequel has to go to the cinema. Regardless of that director Todd Phillips (also involved as a screenwriter) just weird nonsense came up with his once so radically developed topic.
Because what was once the brutal, aggressively scary story of a split personality is now presented like a kind of musical with an overload of singing and dancing. You feel like you’re in LaLaLand and are repeatedly seduced into thinking the whole thing is a cheesy dream play. The whole thing is neither exciting nor particularly interesting, and you can’t help but be amazed.
Arthur Fleck, who committed several murders in his other self as the Joker, is now in a psychiatric hospital awaiting trial. Because you want to do something for the inmates, you try music therapy. This is how the blonde Lee (who is undoubtedly not very dense) comes into his life – or his dreams. She is Lady Gagararely styled in a “beautiful” way, in the original with catastrophic mumbled language and, if you listen closely, a thoroughly mediocre singer. Nevertheless, the two sing and dance together at length, while at the same time there are the usual, cliched prison scenes with the everyday disgust and then the trial. This is plot-wise a bare minimum (and a silliness at that).
The frightening murderer from the first part is no longer mentioned and only rarely played Joaquin Phoenix really shows the oscillation between his personalities (although the Joker himself gets short shrift)..
The trial doesn’t help much either – and if Arthur Fleck lies lifeless on the ground at the end, one can only hope that he is really dead, because another sequel would probably be the next catastrophe.
Renate Wagner
