What’s it about?

As he prepares to stand trial for murder, Arthur Fleck falls for fellow Arkham Asylum inmate — and devoted musical fan — Lee Quinzel.

What did we think?

Let’s start with the positives. The decision to pick up a few years after the original movie with Gotham still in socio-chaos and holding Arthur/Joker up as an anti-hero. Good. The call to make this a musical and insert ambiguity about whether the singing is in real life or in his head? Interesting and brave though it ends up heavy handed. 

And that’s it for the good. 

The rest is rubbish. It’s self-indulgent, bloated – seriously, you could have easily cut 30-40 minutes out of this without changing much – and the musical numbers somehow become tedious. On top of that when you sit back at the end of it, you realise very little has happened and the plot is virtually non-existent.

Painful and pretentious, this unnecessary sequel just left me feeling like I’d wasted two hours of my life.  

With such an interesting character and the premise of a trial, there was so much possibility for social commentary, mental health exploration and flights of whimsy woven in a thread of realism. Instead it failed to follow through on any of the thought-provoking threads and just served up classic songs and a threadbare story.

Apparently Joker Folie À Deux translates to ‘madness for two’, which ironically proves prophetic; they were crazy for making this second film.