At first, Joker: Folie a Deux is entertaining. Then it quickly isn't

JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX ★★

(MA) 138 minutes

A mantra among makers of blockbusters says that if you come up with a big enough villain, your hero can be an afterthought. If it’s true, no wonder Batman’s mortal enemy, the Joker, has become such a roaring, sneering, anarchic success. His outrages have attracted actors of the calibre of Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger but five years ago, Joaquin Phoenix and director Todd Phillips executed a radical re-evaluation. They decided he was worthy of sympathy, and even empathy. In other words, they re-cast him as a misunderstood hero – a sad-faced clown driven to the brink by loneliness and abuse.

Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel in Joker: Folie a Deux.

And it worked. Phillips’ Joker became a billion-dollar box-office hit as well as winning Phoenix an Oscar, and now they’re back with the sequel, which was inevitable. But with this one, they’re really pushing their luck.

Unfortunately, the best comes at the beginning – a masterly sequence by French animator Sylvain Chomet re-capping the climactic scene from the original film and establishing the main theme, which pursues the Jungian argument that the Joker’s mild-mannered alter ego, Arthur Fleck, is in constant conflict with his destructive double.

This is hardly news, but Phillips and his co-writer, Scott Silver, are out to investigate the concept’s every wrinkle, tic, nightmare and daydream, right down to Arthur’s previously unexploited talent for tap dancing. He falls in love and he does it to music.

Brendan Gleeson (left) as Jackie Sullivan and Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker: Folie a Deux.

The object of his passion is Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn, another star of the DC Comics pantheon but she, too, has had a make-over and bears little resemblance to any Harley you may have come across before. She and Arthur meet in the gloomy confines of the Arkham state asylum, where she’s a patient, and he’s awaiting trial for the murders he committed in the first film.

They bond while watching a screening of the old Fred Astaire movie The Bandwagon, and from that moment, they share a fondness for finishing their every sentence with a burst of song. At first, it’s entertaining. Then it isn’t.

You must also adjust to the realisation that you, too, are going to spend most of the film incarcerated at Arkham. It’s a brilliantly conceived set – an island prison evoking Alcatraz with a few medieval trimmings – but after you’ve absorbed the atmosphere, stir-craziness sets in.

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Brendan Gleeson does his best to rev up the action as a deceptively jovial prison guard who’s slightly starstruck by his proximity to the Joker, while taking great delight in taunting him over his depressed state, and Gaga completely immerses herself in the complications of Lee’s personality. Suffering a psychotic urge to commit arson whenever the opportunity arises, she fancies herself a rebel and the Joker as her soulmate.

Phillips, too, is clearly besotted by Joker and all that his star is doing with him, and while Phoenix’s is a profoundly heartfelt performance, it seems massively over-indulged, especially if you’re watching it in an iMax theatre. His chain-smoking quickly becomes a major visual motif with endless shots of him with head thrown back, sending spirals of smoke into the spotlit air. And his fantasy life, with or without musical accompaniment, is shamelessly over-used to spin out the film’s excessive running-time.

We’ve become very familiar with Marvel and DC’s habit of “re-imagining” the histories of their superheroes and super-villains. Such is the major studios’ hunger for lucrative tent-pole productions to keep cinemas alive. But this one is wildly misconceived – a small story inflated by grandiose intentions.

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