It was clear from the first instalment that Joaquin Phoenix was one of the very few actors who could do justice to the memory of Heath Ledger's Joker. Now the story continues and brings in Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, an inmate at the same asylum who worships his madness and is therefore appropriately portrayed by another wilfully eccentric self-publicist. This also means that nearly half of the film consists of vintage musical numbers by the two, which varyingly take place inside his mind or in the parallel universe of musicals, where people start singing at the drop of a hat.
The plot, as much as there is one, is the Joker being on trial for the killings he committed in the first film, so there's scarcely an iota of the action you'd get with a standard superhero or supervillain production. That's all well and good, but the tone is uncertain, fluctuating constantly between serious drama and the show tunes, and so it's no wonder that most critics scorned it. I consider it an interesting take on the genre instead, although a pretty imperfect one.
5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment