I did not get a chance to see it but I intend to when it comes out on streaming. I see a lot of reviews on youtube that it is the worst movie of 2024. I’m avoiding watching those to avoid spoilers but can someone paint a general view of why it was so bad?
I haven’t watched it but I’ve seen plenty of spoilers, and the gist is that the director eschewed all fan service and decided to make a jukebox musical that just happened to star Joaquin Phoenix playing character that shared some similarities to Arthur Fleck from Joker.
So no issues that Harley was a patient and not his psychologist?
I think that’s a bit of interesting backstory in most versions but isn’t necessary for the character…and certainly not for the world of this Joker.
If anything, it seems to me that the director decided to overtly troll the kind of viewers who don’t get subtext and whose takeaway from the first movie was “Arthur Fleck is so cool and I want to be like him”, and made a movie about toxic fandom where a man’s own fandom turns on him after he decides he doesn’t want to be who they think he is.
I went in not knowing it’s a musical, so that was a weird surprise, and also made Lady Gaga’s inclusion feel like stunt casting. She was good and Joaquin was outstanding. Made me sad to see him acting his heart out in such a dud.
Wait, what…?! They made the sequel a musical? Why?
I think it was bad simply because there was nothing good about it. Whatever it was trying to do, it failed.
Whilst this is a comedy channel, the reasons why bad movies are bad is usually pretty faithfully described:
Thought it was an alright movie. I honestly just felt really bad for Joker and how he was treated. I thought Lady Gaga as an asylum patient was hot but I prefer her without makeup and thought they’d be going a different diraction with it. Overall, it shoulda been a lot better. I get why they wanted to do smth with Joker but it just didn’t land well. They shoulda done smth different with the sequel and not have made Joker be a coping mechanism.
Just watched it on Max. With its worst movie ever reviews I was expecting awful. It wasn’t. It was a bit weird but I actually thought it sorta worked.
Not sure who its audience is though? Not the usual Batman universe crowd. I wouldn’t be surprised if it became a cult classic in a decade or so. Finding its audience eventually.
It is also weird watching crowds cheering for a character who murdered people who they felt deserved it with recent the recent news cycle.
Besides the names “Joker” and “Harley Quinn”, what do either of these two characters have to do with the many iterations of these two I have seen over the years? They could have named him “Patrick Bateman” and it would have served just as well…which is not much at all. As far as I can see those names were just franchised out to bring in people, who spent approximately 17 seconds figuring out that those things in the poke were most definitely pigs.
The Joker of these two movies is a consistent character. But this clearly a different universe of the DC multiverse than our usual Batman one. 
I don’t see the second musical version as being the same as much as the one previously made, and either one could be seen as a test to see if name similarities alone could be enough as far as the audience was concerned.
Oh I see them in direct continuity. The musical aspects are his delusions and imagination. Seeing his world largely filtered through his imagined perception of it was an aspect of the first one as well.
Pigs are what you do want in pokes. If your poke has a pig in it, you are a satisfied customer.
I prefer tuna poke. Pork poke does not appeal…
It strikes me as they’ve now twice had some success with a “well here’s a good script for a movie, let’s just stick a DC name on it, and claim alternative universe”. Original Joker and The Penguin series (both of these could be “the rise of dude with a scar on his face”) being those.
It does seem unnecessary to remove Harley Quinn from the half decent back story of her being his doctor who he drives insane, and she becomes his girlfriend.
And taking Lady Gaga, who is usually plastered with makeup, to play a character usually plastered with makeup, and get her to play it without being plastered in makeup, does seem like an unusual choice.
If he had gone to a party dressed like that my first thought would have been “Stopped at the drug store five minutes ago with no idea at all”, and without the label “Harley Quinn” would have been my 7453 guess…right after “1973 VW Bug with 1 flat tire stuck in a Radio Shack parking lot at 4 in the morning”.