I have watched
Joker with the help of a shitty camrip. I didn't particularly like it, but to be fair, that's down to my own taste more than the quality of the film. It's competently made, and like pretty much everyone has said, Joaquin Phoenix gives a committed, compelling performance. He's great, and so is the production design, giving us a scuzzy Gotham that feels like it's been ripped right out of the late seventies/early eighties. I'm always happy to see a stylized Gotham. In fact, I'd love it if they actually kept this look for the solo Batman movie, giving the city a unique, retro feel. I don't think anyone at WB feels beholden to Snyder's portrayal of Gotham as a boring city identical to Metropolis.
The biggest problem with this movie for me is that so much of it is just a dull conga line of trauma and humiliation for its main character. Arthur's life sucks. His boss hates him. His psychiatrist treats him with contempt. Robert DeNiro's talk-show host apparently has nothing better to do than make fun of him bombing when he tries some stand-up because of his uncontrollable laughter. Zazie Beetz's character is connected with a twist that's both very stupid and leaves her feeling largely superfluous to the movie.* Even Arthur's mother is eventually revealed to have let him down in a big way. It all feels very implausible, contrived, and most importantly, simply boring. They could have confined all this misery to the first act, and spent the rest of the movie showing what happens when Arthur embraces the Joker persona, what he next sets out to do, how it affects life in Gotham, how people treat him now, etc. Instead, Arthur doesn't really become the Joker until the very end of the movie, and his body count is surprisingly low. This is like if
Batman Begins had ended with Bruce saying, "Yes, father. I shall become a bat."
And there's more. The movie's efforts to deliver important social commentary and generally Say Something are derailed by the fact that the movie really has nothing to say. Instead, we get a lot of hollow posturing and empty gestures at political issues that are never followed up. For example, there's a scene that's clearly meant to be reminiscent of the
Bernie Goetz shooting from 1984. Only neither the scene nor the aftermath have anything to do with the issues that that incident raised, like race or the limits of self-defense or anything like that - every character assumes that it's a straightforward murder and it ends up inexplicably kicking off an anti-rich protest movement. So what was the point of invoking Goetz at all? I honestly think it was just a lazy way to try and make the movie seem important and politically insightful. The same thing applies to the protest movement. There's no real narrative or thematic connection between Arthur's story and what the protesters are arguing for, and the movie isn't interested in resolving any possible conflict that might arise from Arthur's explicit disavowal of politics and the movement's clear political motivations.
I've also got to give a shout-out to the last five or ten minutes of the movie. Arthur gives a yammering, tortured "We live in a society" speech, which is awful, and could only have been improved if he had used that exact phrase. Actually, I'm kind of glad that Arthur is so awkward and not particularly compelling, as it does reduce the likelihood of him becoming an edgelord icon the way Heath Ledger's Joker did. And right at the end, this movie has the balls to
show the Waynes getting killed yet again. The scene that everybody in the world has had more than enough of, and they recreate it once again - not even in a Batman movie! We had better not see this again in Matt Reeves's movie. I am so sick of seeing this scene again and again and again.*I'm pretty sure that this twist was a late addition to the movie, which I'm basing on both
things that the cast have said and the fact that in the original script, which leaked some time ago,
Arthur ends up murdering Beetz's character as revenge for her rejecting him. This was undoubtedly changed for being appallingly misogynistic and too disturbing to be included as part of an anti-hero's journey to self-actualization, especially when all of Arthur's other murders are meant to be softened slightly because of the victims' awful behavior towards him. In a way, this essentially establishes
Joker's identity crisis - it wants to be shocking and transgressive, but can't bring itself to make its protagonist too unsympathetic.
edit - fixed saddam's borked link