a “Folie à deux” for next to nothing – Libération

Todd Phillips is striving to create a sequel to his success driven by his American actor. It was expected to be a failure, and it is. Lady Gaga, as Harley Quinn, unfortunately does not raise the level.

From the first Joker, huge success despite, or thanks to, the fact that Todd Phillips proposed with it a kind of alternative to the explosive formula of the contemporary superhero blockbuster, there was no sequel to draw. Or a film that is otherwise out of the ordinary, very far, really, from the studio film, which would take up the cause of the complete political nihilism which was outlined in the last minutes of Joker, when Arthur Fleck, thanks to the live ritual murder of a king of television comedy, was consecrated the ecstatic idol of a revolution, with an unleashing of blind fury to boot. A Joker 2 filthy total destruction, gore, even completely fascist?

We remember, the program of the first film was simple – Fleck, avatar invented by Phillips, new avatar of the Batman super villain, a person so cornered by the adversity of his cultural and social environment that he became a lethal weapon. and irresistible – but the film’s outburst of violence was so timely that it resonated, through the picturesqueness of its reconstruction of New York seventies and the fog of its ideological confusion, like a political catharsis. As if Phillips, the dealer in excessive comedies (Very Bad Trip 1,2,3…), had written it connected to a meteorological antenna