Three words to describe the new movie musical “Joker: Folie à Deux” would be, uninteresting, slow, and confusing. I found myself wondering several times throughout the movie, “when will this pick up?” or, “how much longer is this movie?” For this movie to be two hours and 18 minutes long and not be able to maintain its audience’s attention is a testament to the director, Todd Phillips’, lack of ability to properly share its characters’ story. Just because a film is long, does not automatically make it interesting. There are many scenes where Arthur Fleck, a.k.a the Joker, is singing as we just stare at the actor’s face for an awkwardly long period of time until finally panning to a different shot with him still singing in the background.

There were also a lot of scenes where we would once again, stare at the actors face for an uncomfortable amount of time just for us to try and pay attention to whatever is faintly being said in the background.

When the movie first begins it shows a “Looney Tunes” like introduction with Arthur Fleck starring in a show called, “Me and My Shadow.” The animation itself is unappealing and quite boring to look at, the colors are dull and the characters are stiff. The main reason for the animation is just to show what had happened in the past movie and show Arthur Flecks experiences his personality being split and that the Joker is another personality, or person, all together. The shadow resembling Fleck’s Joker persona shows how it can take control and cause him to be desperately out of control. The animation was not shown again throughout the film, leaving the audience to believe that this was a show of complete lack of creativity and to better enhance the movie. The movie continues to be visually unappealing all the way till the end. The view being a character’s face or scenes held out for too long leaving the audience with nothing to look at but the actors blank expression.

Then, throughout the film it fails to maintain a plot. At first, it’s assumed that the plot we follow would be that Arthur Fleck is going to be in court for his murders; all while staying in “Arkham,” an asylum for the mentally ill. Then we have a side plot of his romance with the character Harley Quinn reimagined. Her character is now no longer the psychologist of Arthur Fleck, but another patient in the hospital. When first presented she says that she lived in the same neighborhood as Fleck and that her father beat her but died in a car crash. She then, in a feat of rage, burned their home down. We later find out from Flecks’ lawyer that Quinn had lied, she had actually checked herself into the hospital just so that she may have the chance to meet him. Plus that both of her parents were alive and lived in the “good part” of town.

Deciding to change her character to this different persona, completely destroys the character Harley Quinn as a whole. Then, there’s another plot of Arthur Fleck being treated poorly and abused by the police in Arkham. Which is always added in at the most arbitrary points of the movie, never truly holding any real meaning throughout. There are so many side situations that occur that you never get answers to and never lead to a bigger picture; such as, how is it that the Joker and Harley Quinn are able to walk around the asylum with lighters and cigarettes? Why does Quinn have access to be alone with Fleck for so long? These remain unanswered questions.
With the persona of Fleck having a split personality, his alter ego is The Joker. We get these moments where we are inside of Fleck’s mind where he is aggressive or in completely different places. As a viewer, it is difficult to differentiate between which scenes were real or in his mind. Since the movie is portrayed as a musical, in some scenes he is singing and the people around him are confused but then in other scenes people are joining in. On one hand this is a great example of showing how it feels in Fleck’s mind, not being able to discern what is physically happening. But on the other hand, without many cues as to what’s real and what’s imaginary the film leads you to believe that large portions of the plot is real, only for you to discover that none of it had actually happened. It gets confusing and upsetting to devote your emotions to something only to find that it didn’t actually matter.

Overall, the main populus of viewers maintain an overall negative opinion of the movie. On Rotten Tomatoes, “Joker: Folie à Deux” only has a 33% on the Tomatometer and an even lower score of 30% on the Popcorn meter. The main criticism is for the script, runtime, pacing, and characterization, which several critics deemed “underdeveloped”. On Rotten Tomatoes Varun M wrote, “Incoherent storytelling. Song and dance routines felt out of place and unnecessary. Overall, the movie failed to have any impact.” Another viewer, Howard L., wrote, “Acting was great when there wasn’t singing. Musical elements just not well correlated to plot or character development. Loved first one. This one not so much. Almost left out of boredom.” I feel that if Todd Phillips had spent more time on truly building the plot and maintaining a visually pleasing story, the movie could have been a lot better and actually entertaining to watch.