Name: Joker: Folie à Deux.
Age: Released last week.
A moving picture, right? Yes, the sequel to 2019’s Joker, Todd Phillips’s critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning take on the DC Comics supervillain.
I remember. Starring a lot of stairs, and Joaquin Phoenix in clown makeup. Is he in the sequel? He is, as is Lady Gaga. Folie à deux, as you’ll know, is French for “madness for two”, and refers to a shared delusional disorder.
Does Gaga sing? Plenty. Sings, acts, everything. This one is a musical.
Sounds great. Two tickets please. Hmmm, are you sure?
Oh. Notices not so good? The Daily Beast said: “Joker: Folie à Deux is so bad and so boring it’s absolutely shocking.” The New York Post called it “pathologically unnecessary”. Vanity Fair said: “Startlingly dull.”
The Guardian? Peter Bradshaw was quite generous with his stars (three), also about Lady G’s performance, though he agreed it was “often flat-out tedious”. On Rotten Tomatoes, it currently commands a critics’ score of 33%.
What do critics know? Who needs experts? The punters, and Joker fans, are going to love it, no? Not so much. The audience rating is currently 31%. There are a few things punters aren’t happy about.
Apart from it being really boring? So there’s speculation on social media – particularly among Gaga fans – that some scenes the singer was seen filming, even one that appears in the trailer, are missing from the movie. They think bits of her have been left on the cutting room floor and there’s a call to “release the Gaga cut”.
What do she and Phoenix think of the final film, incidentally? Yeah, so this is also interesting. In one interview, when asked, they looked at each other and giggled nervously. Amateur lip readers think that Phoenix said it is horrible. Oh, and there are rumours of a fallout between Todd Phillips and DC Studios. And it gets worse.
Worse than being hated by critics, audiences, maybe even its own stars? If being mocked is worse than being hated.
Ooh, Go on. It’s because in the film one minute the Joker is sharing dark and suicidal thoughts with Gaga’s character, and the next thing you know the two are performing an upbeat jazz standard.
And the brilliant meme-makers out there aren’t going to let that one pass? You got it.
And how’s all this reflected at the box office? Globally, it took $114.8m in the opening weekend.
That does’t sound too bad. The first film, which had only one-third of the budget of the sequel, took $248.4m in its opening weekend. You can safely add box office flop to all the other kinds of flop.
Do say: “Shall we do dinner à deux instead?”
Don’t say: “When’s Joker: Ménage à Trois coming out?”
