Let's put on a happy face, at least to start, for “Joker: Folie à Deux.”
If there's one undeniably compelling thing about both Todd Phillips' divisive 2019 original and his new follow-up, it's that these movies are best when they dance. The first movie might have been a muddled attempt to retrofit a “Taxi Driver”-styled ‘70s realism into a Joker origin story, but, man, when Joaquin Phoenix is on his toes, it's hard to look away.
Just the image of a gaunt Phoenix decked out in the red suit, with his green-streaked hair slicked back, was enough to give “Joker” a kick. The role gave Phoenix, a full-bodied actor, a day-glo canvas on which to unleash torrents of movement, cycling between wounded restraint and flamboyant release, in a comic-book genre that usually leaves performers paralyzed by spandex.
He's nearly as captivating in “Joker: Folie à Deux," a musical that closely follows the events of the first film as an imprisoned Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) goes on trial for the murders that occurred at the culmination of "Joker.” Even the way Phoenix theatrically smokes as Arthur — which he does quite a lot in "Folie à Deux" — shows you how much he's luxuriating in the limber physicality of the character.
But any sense of forward momentum has gone out the window in “Joker: Folie à Deux,” which opens in theaters Thursday. Phillips has followed his very anti-hero take on the Joker with an a very anti-sequel. It combines prison drama, courthouse thriller and musical, and yet turns out remarkably inert given how combustible the original was. If ”Joker" — which some claimed sympathized the kind of lone gunmen that populate our real world — stirred debate, “Folie à Deux” is a self-conscious rejoinder to all that discussion, spending much of its time interrogating Arthur's actions from the last movie.
That makes it a theoretically interesting film but a curiously dull one, particularly given that it stars two such incredibly watchable performers in Phoenix and Lady Gaga, who plays a fellow inmate, Lee Quinzel, infatuated with the Joker. Phillips deserves credit for subverting expectations. Most directors would turn Arthur loose for a sequel chock-full of violence and mayhem, not Burt Bacharach song-and-dance sequences. But laudable as the intentions of “Folie à Deux” may be, it feels thoughtfully but tiresomely stuck in the past.
“You gotta joke for us today?” asks an Arkham State Hospital guard (Brendan Gleeson, back inside a jail post-"Paddington 2") as they pull Arthur from his cell. He is seemingly even thinner now, his shoulder blades sticking out. A wan look shows he's jokeless, too, having clearly reverted back to the depression that Arthur earlier stewed in.
That interaction, and others that follow, carries on some of the themes of “Joker,” which imagined Arthur and the mania that springs from him as the warped product of a cruel urban world and failed social safety net. Arthur is now heading for either the death penalty or life in prison, it's just a matter of whether his attorney (Catherine Keener) can convince a jury that he suffers from split personality syndrome.
We are again asked to consider and weigh how Arthur is treated by those around him, including the guards who at turns mock him, ask him for his autograph or show him a little compassion. Gotham City district attorney, Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey), believes he should die for killing five, including the late-night talk-show host Murray Franklin live on air. Does Arthur deserve our sympathy? “Folie à Deux” is a little like the “Seinfeld” finale: a moral, courtroom rehashing.
The throngs outside the courthouse clamor not for Arthur but the Joker, who they regard as an anarchist martyr. They crave entertainment, and Arthur, or the Joker, is tempted to give it to them. One psychology expert claims Arthur's mental illness is “just a show.” In many ways — including a mock Looney Tunes cartoon that opens the movie — “Folie à Deux” continues the first movie's interest in considering, and satirizing, what it is we crave in entertainment. Do we want the "real" story of Arthur or the fantasy of the Joker?
I'm not sure “Folie à Deux” always successfully pegs audience desire, though. What I most wanted in “Folie à Deux” was for it to stop playing with the concepts of its characters and instead let them breathe a little more on their own. It's not surprising that the movie works best when Arthur and Lee lock into one other. This is Arthur's first blush with the love he's lacked ("She gets me," he says), but their connection may also have more to do with fantasy. Their time together is actually somewhat limited but, in Arthur's imagination, their emotions soar in songs, mostly old standards ("Get Happy," “For Once in My Life,” “That's Life”), they sing tenderly to one another.
These musical interludes break free of an otherwise fairly bleak and belabored narrative, as a legal and penal system that doesn't know how to handle Arthur's pain — or that he's a reflection of their failure — help twist him back into the Joker. Once the Joker does fully emerge, Phoenix's Fleck is visibly aghast at what he's wrought.
All of this wrestling with “The Joker” makes “Folie à Deux” an impressively un-superhero-movie-like, and a deliberate denial of audience expectation. But it's also spinning its wheels. It's not surprising that “Folie à Deux” originated in concept as a stage show. It's stuck in place, with only Phoenix's dazzling contortions to marvel at.
“Joker: Folie à Deux," a Warner Bros. release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some strong violence, language throughout, some sexuality, and brief full nudity. Running time: 139 minutes. Two stars out of four.
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Joaquin Phoenix, foreground center, and Brendan Gleeson, background center, in a scene from "Joker: Folie à Deux." (Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Lady Gaga in a scene from "Joker: Folie à Deux." (Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Lady Gaga in a scene from "Joker: Folie à Deux." (Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
An Israeli airstrike on an apartment in central Beirut has killed nine people, according to Lebanon's health ministry. Israel has been pounding areas of the country where the Hezbollah militant group has a strong presence since late September, but has rarely struck in the heart of the capital.
There was no warning before the strike late Wednesday, which hit an apartment in central Beirut not far from the United Nations headquarters, the prime minister’s office and parliament. Hezbollah’s civil defense unit said seven of its members were killed.
The strike came as Israel was pursuing a ground incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah, while also conducting strikes in Gaza that killed dozens, including children. The Israeli military said eight soldiers have died in the conflict in southern Lebanon.
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire across the Lebanon border almost daily since the day after Hamas’ cross-border attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 others hostage. Israel declared war on the militant group in the Gaza Strip in response. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in the territory, and just over half the dead have been women and children, according to local health officials.
Here is the latest:
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden says he doesn’t expect Israel to retaliate immediately against Iran and rejects the suggestion the U.S. would grant permission for such an attack.
Biden was speaking to reporters Thursday, two days after Tehran bombarded Israel with almost 200 ballistic missiles. Israel says it intercepted many of them, while Iran says most of its missiles hit their targets.
The barrage has raised concerns about the escalating conflict in the Middle East and the role of the U.S. in Israel’s defense.
“First of all, we don’t ‘allow’ Israel, we advise Israel,” Biden said. “And nothing’s going to happen today.”
JERUSALEM — Israel says one of its airstrikes in Gaza killed a Palestinian who was convicted in the killing of two Israeli soldiers by an angry crowd in the West Bank at the start of the 2000 uprising.
Abdel-Aziz Salha was in a mob that stormed a Palestinian police station in the West Bank city of Ramallah and killed two Israeli reservists. The two had been detained after accidentally entering an area administered by the Palestinian Authority.
Salha waved his blood-stained hands from the window of the police station in what became one of the defining images of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule.
The killing of the reservists marked a major escalation in Israeli-Palestinian tensions as the peace process of the 1990s collapsed.
The military said Thursday that Salha was killed in an overnight strike on the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah. The military identified him as a Hamas militant.
Salha was arrested by Israeli forces shortly after the killing of the two reservists, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
He was among more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners released in 2011 in exchange for an Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas in Gaza. One of the other released prisoners, Yahya Sinwar, was one of the masterminds of the Oct. 7 attack and is now the top leader of Hamas.
BEIRUT —Lebanon’s minister of public works and transport says all the country’s border crossing with Syria function under the supervision of state institutions.
Ali Hamie spoke to reporters hours after the Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesman posted on X that Lebanon’s Hezbollah group is trying to transport military equipment through the Masnaa border crossing with Syria.
“All border crossings, the first among them the Masnaa border crossing” are under the monitoring of state institutions including the transport ministry, customs authorities, the General Security Directorate and the Lebanese army.
Israeli military spokesperson, Avchay Adraee, called on Lebanese authorities earlier Thursday to conduct inspections on trucks crossing its eastern border and to turn back any vehicle found to be containing combat equipment.
“The Lebanese State is responsible for its official border crossings and is able to prevent Hezbollah from passing through these crossings,” Adraee said on X.
In the same post, Adraee said Israeli forces bombed a truck on Sunday packed with weapons that Hezbollah was trying to smuggle into Lebanon. No further details about this airstrike were made public.
In recent weeks, the Israeli air force has struck hundreds of targets across Lebanon, including the eastern border area and the Bekaa valley, areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence.
Analysts have long accused the Iran-backed group of transporting weapons across the porous Lebanese-Syrian border.
BERUIT — Lebanese Health Ministry Firas Abiad said Thursday that Israeli strikes that have hit health facilities and workers are in “violation of international law and treaties.”
“This is a war crime, there is no doubt about that,” Abiad said, speaking to journalists Thursday, after an overnight Israeli strike on an apartment building in Beirut hit a Hezbollah health center and killed seven civilian first responders affiliated with the group and after a separate strike wounded Red Cross paramedics evacuating wounded people in southern Lebanon.
“The argument that some vehicles or hospitals had weapons or something else in them, these are old false arguments and lies we heard before in Gaza,” Abiad said. “International laws are clear in protecting these people - I mean, paramedics. Who gave Israel the right to be the judge and the executioner at the same time?”
BEIRUT -- An Israeli airstrike on a Beirut southern suburb struck Thursday the building housing the media office of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group.
The airstrike destroyed the building housing the Media Relations office of Hezbollah in the Mawad neighborhood on the southern edge of Beirut.
Hezbollah official told The Associated Press that employees of the group’s media office are fine and no one was hurt.
In southern Lebanon, Israeli fire at a Lebanese army post in the town of Bint Jbeil killed a Lebanese soldier, raising to two the number of members of the Lebanese military killed on Thursday.
The Lebanese army said in a statement that troops “open fire at the source of” the attack. It did not elaborate.
A Lebanese security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of regulations said that the army post was hit by artillery fire.
BRUSSELS — Belgium’s VTM broadcaster says that one of its television reporters and a cameraman have been attacked in central Beirut while reporting on the war between Israel and Hezbollah.
VTM said that correspondent Robin Ramaekers and cameraman Stijn De Smet were working on a report on Wednesday evening about a bombing in the Lebanese capital when they were attacked in unclear circumstances.
“Stijn is currently in a hospital in Beirut where he is being treated for a leg wound. Robin is also still being cared for, in another hospital, for some fractures to the face,” a statement said. It underlined that the cause of the attack is not yet known.
VTM said the two men have worked in conflict zones for more than a decade. Lebanon’s Information Minister Ziad Makary said only that he is “following” the situation
MADRID — Spain’s defense ministry says its two planes sent to Beirut to evacuate Spanish civilians have taken off and are heading to an airbase near Madrid.
Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said that between 400 and 500 of the around 1,000 Spaniards registered as living in Lebanon are being airlifted out. The government has urged all Spaniards to leave and is offering to assist those who say they want to be evacuated.
Robles said that a third plane could be sent if needed.
Spain also has 676 soldiers in Lebanon deployed under a United Nations peacekeeping mission. Robles said that the troops are staying put until otherwise ordered by the U.N. command.
ISTANBUL — Hundreds of people leaving Lebanon arrived in southern Turkey Thursday.
A ship carrying over 300 passengers who boarded the vessel in the Lebanese city of Tripoli docked at a port in Mersin on the country’s Mediterranean coast, according to Turkish news agency IHA.
IHA said the Med Lines ship transporting foreign nationals was the third to arrive at the Mersin port in recent days.
The passengers then travel onward to their home countries, IHA reported.
The increasing violence in Lebanon is a significant escalation in the war in the Middle East, this time between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
BEIRUT —The Lebanese Red Cross says an Israeli strike killed four of its paramedics and a Lebanese army soldier as they were evacuating wounded people from the south. It says the convoy near the village of Taybeh, which was accompanied by Lebanese troops, was targeted Thursday despite coordinating its movements with U.N. peacekeepers.
BEIRUT — The Israeli military has ordered the evacuation of villages and towns in southern Lebanon that are north of a United Nations-declared buffer zone established after the 2006 war. The warning issued Thursday signaled a possible broadening of Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon, which until now has been confined to areas close to the border.
BEIRUT —Lebanon’s Health Ministry Thursday said that at least nine people were killed in an Israeli strike in central Beirut, as it is also running DNA tests on remains they have obtained to identify others.
Hezbollah said that seven paramedics and rescue workers from its medical arm the Islamic Health Committee were killed in the strike that hit its office in Bashoura. The Health Ministry said 14 others were wounded in the strike early Thursday.
Prior to the attack, the ministry said that 55 people were killed and 156 others were wounded in Israeli strikes over Lebanon on Wednesday.
The frequent strikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs as well as occasional strikes in central Beirut have exacerbated Lebanon’s displacement crisis. The government estimated days ago that some one million people are currently displaced in the cash-strapped country.
Environment Minister Nasser Yassin, who is spearheading the government’s response efforts to the war, told local media that some 167,000 Syrians left Lebanon over the past 24 hours alone. The Associated Press could not independently confirm.
JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said Thursday that it killed a senior Hamas leader in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip around three months ago.
It said that a strike on an underground compound in northern Gaza killed Rawhi Mushtaha and two other Hamas commanders, Sameh Siraj and Sameh Oudeh.
There was no immediate comment from Hamas.
The military said the three commanders had taken refuge in a fortified underground compound in northern Gaza that served as a command and control center.
It said Mushtaha was a close associate of Yahya Sinwar, the top leader of Hamas who helped mastermind the Oct. 7 attack into Israel that triggered the war.
Sinwar is believed to be alive and in hiding inside Gaza.
NICOSIA, Cyprus — The British government chartered more flights to help U.K. nationals leave Lebanon, a day after an evacuation flight left Beirut.
The government said in a statement that the flights will continue as “long as the security situation allows” and that it’s working to increase capacity on commercial flights for British nationals.
U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey on Wednesday visited a British military base on Cyprus where around 700 troops, Foreign Office staff and Border Force officers have been deployed to a British military base in Cyprus to help with evacuation plans.
British nationals and their spouses, partners and children under the age of 18 are eligible. Dependents who aren’t British nationals will need a valid visa granting a maximum six-month stay in the U.K.
BEIRUT — An Israeli strike in the Lebanese capital Beirut killed seven health and rescue workers, an Islamic health organization said.
The airstrike in the residential Bashoura district targeted an apartment in a multi-story building that houses an office of the Health Society, a group of civilian first responders affiliated to Hezbollah.
It was the closest strike to the central downtown district of Beirut, where the United Nations and government offices are located.
It was the second airstrike to hit central Beirut this week and the second to directly target the Health Society in 24 hours. No Israeli warning was issued to the area before it was hit. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strike in central Beirut or the allegations it used phorphorous bombs.
Israel has mostly concentrated its airstrikes in south and eastern Lebanon, as well as the southern suburbs of Beirut where Hezbollah has a strong presence, but its attacks have spanned the entire country and killed many civilians.
Beirut’s southern suburbs also saw heavy bombardment overnight in areas where the Israeli army had earlier issued a warning online for residents to evacuate.
TOKYO — Japan on Thursday dispatched two Self Defense Force planes to prepare for a possible airlift of Japanese citizens from Lebanon.
Two C-2 transport aircraft are expected to arrive in Jordan and Greece on Friday, Japan NHK national television reported.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters that there has been no report of injury involving the about 50 Japanese nationals in Lebanon.
Japan dispatched SDF aircraft in October and November 2023 to evacuate more than 100 Japanese and South Korean citizens from Israel.
SYDNEY — Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Thursday her government had booked 500 seats on commercial aircraft for Australian citizens, permanent residents and their families to leave Lebanon on Saturday.
The seats are available to 1,700 Australians and their families known to be in Lebanon on two flights from Beirut to Cyprus, Wong said.
“What I would say to Australians who wish to leave, please take whatever option is available to you,” Wong told reporters in Geelong, Australia.
“Please do not wait for your preferred route,” she added.
A Hezbollah paramedic walks between debris after an airstrike hit an apartment in a multistory building, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Lebanese women stand in front an apartment in a multistory building hit by Israeli airstrike, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
A destroyed apartment in a multistory building hit by Israeli airstrike, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Hezbollah paramedics walk between debris after an airstrike hit an apartment in a multistory building, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
A woman reacts in front an apartment in a multistory building hit by Israeli airstrike, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
This image from United Nations Television, shows Israel Ambassador Danny Danon during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (UNTV via AP)
Soldiers carry the coffin of Israeli Army Capt. Eitan Yitzhak Oster, who was killed in action in Lebanon, during his funeral at Mt. Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
An Israeli Apache helicopter releases flares near the Israeli-Lebanon border, as seen from northern Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)
Smoke rises from the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Police stand guard at the site of an apparent Israeli airstrike in Damascus, Syria, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)
Workers clean at the site of an apparent Israeli airstrike in Damascus, Syria, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)
People collecting remains of victims after an airstrike that hit an apartment in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
A firefighter stands in front of an apartment hit by an Israeli airstrike, in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
