(may contain spoilers)
Douban rating: 6.1
Director: Todd Phillips
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson
Douban Comments: “The first 30 minutes really weren’t necessary. Also, if Harley Quinn isn’t supposed to be a metaphor for a personality, there’s no reason for her to even be there – she’s as pointless as the opera-style storytelling. I’ll give one star for the reputation of the previous film, one star for the actors’ performances, and one star for the ending’s metaphor and the mental shift. If they’d used ‘Die with a Smile’ as the theme song, I might’ve given one more star. Someone called it Ha Ha Land, which cracked me up.”
“I absolutely love this movie – it’s the complete opposite of the first one and acts as an ‘anti-Joker’ film that deconstructs the Joker character. If the previous film focused on the Joker as a symbol of madness and primal instincts, this one brings us back to Arthur, a fragile, repressed human. The Joker’s creation was already a deconstruction of the traditional hero story, but as the Joker became a glorified anti-hero, this movie tears him down again, grounding him in his human side. It’s a story about complex humanity: there’s no Joker born to rebel, only an Arthur who resists oppression. Or rather, it’s always been Arthur – vulnerable, broken, violent, and mad.
When the Joker is shown as a complex person, it suggests everyone has both Arthur and Joker within them. But like Harley Quinn, who gets swept up in the show, audiences only want to see what they want to see: either they dismiss him as weak, submissive Arthur, or they glorify him as the rebellious, violent Joker. Yet they refuse to see him for what he really is – a mix of weakness and violence. This is what the movie reconstructs after tearing down the myth.”
“Everyone loves the Joker, but what people really want is just the fantasy – no one actually cares about Arthur. As the subject of these fantasies, this show presents a more multi-dimensional Joker and shows how he is treated by others. The lawyer and Harley Quinn represent two types of people. The lawyer is rational, viewing him as an object, someone to help live a normal, ordinary life. Harley, on the other hand, comes for the fantasy, drawn to his madness, pushing him towards becoming a legend, cutting off any path back to normalcy. Just like us, the audience – we all want to see the extreme Joker, not the mundane Arthur, don’t we?
3.5 stars (I loved the scene where he sets fire in the prison, but there were too many musical moments, which felt a bit out of place).”
“The director tries hard to make the musical segments feel natural – like by showing that some characters just love to sing, or by using song and dance to depict fantasy sequences that contrast with the bleakness of reality. But in the second half, the singing gets a bit excessive and packed in, almost like they’re trying to get their money’s worth with Lady Gaga. Sometimes, it’s just a fixed close-up on a face singing a whole song. No matter how talented the actor or singer, that kind of heavy, drawn-out filming gets tedious… I honestly found myself echoing Phoenix’s line: ‘Can’t you just talk instead of singing?’
Even with anti-genre, anti-hero intentions, a movie still needs to be engaging. The first film did such a great job of that, but this one turned into half courtroom drama, half musical. The film seems to be aware that audiences want to see a revenge-driven, satisfying story – so instead, it chooses to leave you feeling trapped and frustrated. It’s rare to see a superhero film that leaves you this down. This Joker really is helpless, unable to fight back against anything. Life’s hard enough as it is; if I could, I’d still want to be the bad guy in a movie.”
