When it was first announced that Todd Phillips, the director of The Hangover series, was planning to release a solo Joker film with Joaquin Phoenix as the lead actor portraying Arthur Fleck; I was, as many other people were, incredibly skeptical towards the end result. A man most famous for directing incredibly subpar “comedies” (if you can even call them that) taking on a very infamous character in what seemed to be a serious drama, looked like it had every element it needed to become a complete disaster for everyone involved. But now that the movie has officially come out, it has actually managed to become the highest grossing R-rated film of all time, and received critical acclaim from general audiences as well as most critics. It even won the Golden Lion in this year’s Venice Film Festival. However, was all that praise and financial success actually well deserved? I personally don’t believe that to be the case. 

 

My main problem with Joker, as it is with many other films of this nature, is that the director Todd Phillips thinks what he is making is much more clever or important than what the end result actually turned out to be. This movie clearly has a thesis on mental illness and how people don’t receive proper mental healthcare, as well as classism for some reason, but it shoves these half assed messages down your throat basically every 10 minutes, while also not going further with any of them. At first, the things that make Arthur sad are generally believable, but then the world around him just becomes so comically mean in an over the top way that you start to feel genuinely disconnected from the film as a whole. Arthur’s character is so poorly-written that without Joaquin Phoenix’s brilliant performance pulling the entire thing together, his personality would basically just be that he gets beaten up a lot and is also mentally ill.

 

As anyone who has seen that film can easily recognize, this movie borrows a lot of ideas from Taxi Driver. But what makes Scorsese’s Travis Bickle scary is that he usually feels like a normal person that can properly function in society until he has his off moments, while Phoenix’s Arthur is basically just mentally ill and there is simply no where for his character to go for the rest of the movie. To me, he is written like a teenage anarchist who knows that he is supposed to be angry, but doesn’t really understand what he is supposed to be angry about. Another critique that this film tries to convey, is regarding how people that are considered to be outside of the norm are treated in society as basically being completely worthless, but the movie can’t even be in alignment with its own ideas, as a little person is used as the punchline to a joke in multiple instances throughout the film.

 

To get into the technical aspects, the score is not groundbreaking like some reviews make it out to be. A good score is one that can convey you the emotions of the character even if you had your eyes closed, and this movie just had sad violin stock music put on repeat to scenes of Arthur either smoking or looking sad over and over, until I literally couldn’t stand it anymore. The color palette was nice, I can see how a usual Marvel or DC fan would be thoroughly impressed by it, since usual superhero movies tend to look absolutely disgusting and vile. The editing was mostly passable, but there were some instances like the staircase scene where it was so atrocious I actually thought there was an error with the theater’s projector. In the end, Joker is just another painfully mediocre comic book movie that people like to pretend has a lot more to say than it actually does.