What a wierd beast Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux, the debut trailer for which was launched this week, seems to be. Right here we have now a comic book guide film that’s actually nothing of the type, a sequel (and a musical one no much less!) to the Oscar-winning character examine of Joaquin Phoenix’s clownish and finally brutal underdog. It is a man who could or could not have some connection to the Batman comics that gave delivery to him, however actually appears to have a far larger hyperlink to the dirty crime movies of Martin Scorsese within the late 70s and early 80s.
It’s as if, 100 years after the invention of the wheel, any person inexplicably determined to show it right into a Frisbee as a substitute. And there may be, to this date, no apparent reply as to why the unique movie labored in any respect, aside from – inexplicably – it made greater than $1bn on the international field workplace and due to this fact will need to have discovered its viewers.
Think about the pitch room at Warner Bros when this one first started morphing into form like one of many BFG’s unhealthy goals. What’s that you simply say, Todd, it has nothing to do with the broader DC prolonged universe, options not a single apparent discernible superhero and no actual motion sequences? Nicely, carry it on!
The truth is that if Warner’s DC films hadn’t been in a horrible mess, and if Phoenix hadn’t determined this was the right venture for him to channel his personal inside demons, the venture would by no means have gotten off the bottom. That it did in any respect is testomony to the great, surprising chaos of the universe, or to present it one other phrase, artwork.
And nonetheless … actually? Are we truthfully to consider that Phillips can ship one more bizarre and ambitiously left-field character examine that hardly exists inside the comedian guide film style, this time with added romance and a hefty facet order of Burt Bacharach and Hal David? Certainly in some unspecified time in the future this unexpectedly flighty story arc will likely be wrenched again down by the normal forces of superhero flick gravity? Arthur Fleck will embark on an evil plan to poison Gotham Metropolis’s water provide with psychedelics. Bats will realign round Gotham’s heroic darkish knight, as Fleck shifts nearly imperceptibly into the shadowy corners of the story.
And sure, I’m conscious Bruce Wayne is a mere sprog on this timeline, however the earlier film already set him on the righteous path to superhero-dom following the homicide of his mother and father, so absolutely it’s solely a matter of time earlier than he’s swooping by the streets of Gotham, cleansing up the mess his dad, Thomas, helped to make.
But when this doesn’t occur, and audiences and critics lap up the left-of-centre freakishness yet again? Maybe the way forward for superhero flicks isn’t in spandex and far-out area adventures in any case. Possibly the following massive DC unhealthy needs to be Travis Bickle or Rupert Pupkin – they might not destroy Superman with superhuman power, chlorokinesis or astral projection, however they might confuse the hell out of him with heightened, navel-gazing psychodrama. And by no means once more would we have now to take a seat by a DC film third-act wherein tediously invincible costumed titans battle one another towards a fiery, CGI hellscape. Scorsese would completely like it.
The jury stays out on whether or not Phillips can repeat the trick with Joker: Folie à Deux. In any case, there may be probably an excellent motive that no one ever made a sequel to Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy, within the format of a musical. However even when the brand new movie fails miserably, it’s probably to present us extra intriguing concepts to take the comedian guide film style ahead than any variety of the brand new episodes at the moment being put collectively by new DC boss James Gunn, good (in a common-or-garden superhero flick form of method) as these could nicely find yourself being.
In any case, as made abundantly clear within the new trailer, it is vitally arduous to place Fleck again in his Arkham Asylum-shaped field as soon as it has develop into clear that one other dozen Jokers will solely spring as much as take his place. Let the chaos start!
