Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in a hit musical

In “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Todd Phillips’s dark and irreverent but actually awkward and down-to-earth musical sequel to “Joker,” Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the sad incel who turned into a psychopathic version of the Joker, is about to stand trial for his crimes. In theory, this seems like a good thing, because Arthur doesn’t get out much. At Arkham State Hospital, he lives in a small, filthy cell from which he’s released each morning so he can sneak down the hallway with his bucket of urine and pour it into a sink. Arthur is nothing but skin and bones, his face lined with despair. The guards, led by the playful sadist Jackie (Brendan Gleeson), keep asking him, “Do you have a problem?” joke for us today?” But Arthur no longer has jokes or smiles. He has become a model of miserabilism again.

Sure, he’s famous now, so much so that he killed late-night talk show host Murray Franklin on live TV that a TV movie was made about him. “Everybody still thinks you’re a star,” Jackie says. He’s right. The whole world knows who Arthur is. A lot of people hate him, but at least one person at Arkham, an inmate named Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), with her two-tone platinum hair and desperate gaze, loves him. She’s seen that TV movie countless times. When he walks into the room, his eyes light up. The rest of the world may think he’s crazy, but she looks at him and sees… Joker.

Arthur’s trial is sure to be a media event. It will be broadcast live on television, and Arthur, in anticipation, submits to a prison interview with Paddy Meyers (Steve Coogan), a scandal-mongering television personality who taunts and taunts him. Arthur responds by singing, in a dry, cracked voice, “I’m wild again, beguiled again…” before launching into “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” from the 1940 musical “Pal Joey.” If you’re surprised to hear him draw from such a repertoire, get used to it. Many of the songs Arthur sings in “Folie à Deux”—”If My Friends Could See Me Now,” “That’s Entertainment!”—sound like they came straight out of your grandmother’s record collection.

Finally, the trial begins, and it all comes down to one key question. No one disputes that Arthur killed Murray Franklin and four others; even Arthur admits it. The only question is whether he will be declared insane, which would spare him the death penalty. His lawyer, played by the tough-as-nails Catherine Keener, argues that Arthur didn’t really commit the crimes because he has a split personality, a deranged alter ego, a hidden identity that takes over him. But Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) argues that he didn’t. not He has a split personality. He’s not two people, Dent said. He’s just sick and sad, Arthur. So he should be held responsible for his actions and found guilty.

This debate is the linchpin of “Joker: Folie à Deux.” It’s even foreshadowed by the film’s opening sequence: a fake 1940s Warner Bros. cartoon in which a backstage Broadway version of Arthur is literally invaded by his murderous shadow (all to the tune of “Me and My Shadow”). But the reason it’s odd, and rather unexciting, to hear the film ruminate on the question of split personality ad nauseam is that “Joker” has already delved into it in the most spectacular way. The premise of the first film, which presented Arthur as a sick sociopath from a Scorsese fever dream, is that unlike the dark side characters in comic book movies, Arthur is really was Just a troubled individual. Even when he wore his smeared clown makeup and red suit, he wasn’t a larger-than-life villain. He was a regular loser pretending to be a larger-than-life villain.

And yet …the dark magic of the film was such that this cobbled-together Joker felt so much power flowing through him that, in a strange way, he did became the Joker. Was he a split personality or just a lonely sicko? The delicious answer is that he was both.

And that’s what we’re looking forward to seeing in Folie à Deux: Arthur, the ordinary maniac who, in a way, by embracing his Joker identity, transcends who he is. The problem with the film is that it rarely makes us feel that way. There are plenty of scenes where Arthur is dressed as the Joker, defending himself in court, singing this or that refrain, sometimes in fantastical numbers that could almost be taking place in his head. But his presence no longer presents any danger. He’s not trying to kill anyone, and he’s not leading a revolution. He’s simply singing and (sometimes) dancing his way through his Joker daydream.

In “Joker,” after shooting these three men in the subway, Arthur takes refuge in a seedy public toilet and performs this crazy tai chi dance that expresses his new power. He feels serene, liberated, reborn in his violence. At that moment, he becomes Joker.

A musical number can do something similar. It is there to elevate ordinary characters, to put them (and us) in touch with the power of their secret selves. In contemporary musicals, what we want to see more than ever, what we want to feel, are characters experiencing emotion and in full swing With her, we want to see them transformed. In our time, the film that rewrote the rules of this experience is “Moulin Rouge!” Beauty, insolence, aesthetic collisions (the fact that dancers and Parisian bohemians at the end of the century sang “Lady Marmalade” and “Your Song”) were part of the transcendence. We felt a foretaste of the same excitement in Lars von Trier’s musical “Dancer in the Dark,” where female sacrifice meets Björk.

I’m not saying that all modern musicals have to be like this. I liked “Hairspray” and “Chicago.” But the premise of “Joker: Folie à Deux” – that Arthur the killer clown and his lover, Lee (who’s starting to think she’s Harley Quinn), will express who they are by becoming jukebox singers… sorry, but that’s not a Broadway concept. It’s a bold concept. It’s a concept that demands bold execution. And most of the time, that doesn’t happen in “Folie à Deux.”

Phillips, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver, should have chosen a wilder range of songs. And the song choice that might have reminded us of that is the needle drop in “Joker”: that snippet of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” as the Joker dances down the stairs of West 167th Street. It’s perhaps the most important moment in the film. It’s the defining moment. When Phillips announced that “Joker 2” was going to be a musical, wasn’t it more than obvious that This is the scene This should have been the guiding spirit of the sequel?

There are a few sequences in “Folie à Deux” that hint at what the movie should have been: a Sonny and Cher-esque version of “The Joker and Harley Show” where the two sing the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody,” or the gospel song “Gonna Build a Mountain,” which Gaga belts out at the top of her lungs. But for the most part, the songs in “Folie à Deux” don’t make us jump and glow. And they don’t make us melt.

Lady Gaga’s casting seemed promising, because she’s a great actress, and she was put on earth (among other things) to do musicals. But Gaga, who has a charming, spontaneous presence in “Folie à Deux,” is woefully underused. Her Lee never really takes flight. Gaga has a nice quiet moment singing “(They Long to Be) Close to You.” (Speaking of Burt Bacharach, why did Phillips waste one of his only choice musical selections, “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” on that opening cartoon?) But the number doesn’t soar. Gaga never gets a chance to do what she did in “A Star Is Born”: seize the audience with her rapture.

I have to mention that this doesn’t happen often enough. in “Folie à Deux”. The film is two hours and 18 minutes long, and here is the full plot:

Arthur is wasting away in Arkham Hospital. He meets Lee, who devotes herself to him. He is put on trial and the debate about split personality or just being a criminal begins. A verdict is rendered. A fatal bomb explodes. The end.

As a critic, I’ve seen my share of debates, but I’ve never understood the moralizing nature of the “Joker” reviews. The fact that the movie invites us to deeply identify with a perverse sociopath wasn’t, in my opinion, a weakness; it was a strength. (It’s the same reason I love “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Taxi Driver,” and “Natural Born Killers.”) The movie was, among other things, an allegory for the Trump era, but it’s almost as if the critics were saying, “We don’t like the movie because Arthur is an evil incel who leads a revolt just like Trump!” To me, the “Joker” reviews were somewhat akin to a studio executive giving notes that basically said, “Jake LaMotta in ‘Raging Bull’ isn’t likable enough.”

Have the critics, with “Joker,” turned into cautious critics of the executives? I think so. But the result is that Todd Phillips, in what I consider a huge mistake, listened to them. “Joker: Folie à Deux” may be ambitious and superficially outrageous, but at its core it’s an overly cautious sequel. Phillips has made a movie in which Arthur is really just poor Arthur; he doesn’t do anything wrong and isn’t going to threaten anyone’s moral sensibilities. In fact, he ruins the only good thing that ever happened to him—winning the love of Harley Quinn, played by Lee—because he disavows the Joker himself. He’s just a singing, dancing puppet clown living in his imagination. that Entertainment? I think audiences will still turn out in droves to see “Folie à Deux.” But when it comes to bold mainstream cinema, it’s the critics who have the last word.