2019 was the year we couldn’t avoid The Joker, Joaquin Phoenix, and Director Todd Phillips. Joker won at Venice, Phoenix swept all the Best Actor awards, and Phillips was suddenly thrust as an auteur after being best known for his Hangover films. Well, that was five years ago, and with this Joker: Folie À Deux, we finally get that sequel that has Phillips, once again, co-writing and directing.

Phoenix is back as Arthur Fleck, and we have Lady Gaga taking on the role of Lee Quinzel (a Harley Quinn in the making). And from the trailer alone, it was revealed how with Gaga in the cast, this was going to have shades of being a musical - a musical that would have her and Joaquin taking on the American Songbook. This sounded both imaginative and outrageous, and I have to admit I was curious. And let me qualify that by saying I also felt it augured well for Gaga playing such a pivotal role. For me, the jury’s still out on whether she’s a competent actress, if not playing the role of a singer. So this abundance of singing would help ensure she’s still on safe ground. And let’s not forget that operative word ‘safe’.

At the drop of a pin in a clothes shop, Gaga and Phoenix are ready to break into song after song in this film. Plaintive singing sequences, fantasy shots, and even songs pop out of nowhere. Gaga is in fine form here, while Phoenix croaks on his renditions - and Kermit’s croaks are more in tune. This film has maybe five too many songs; rather than driving the narrative, they start to feel like stretching devices and bog down the storytelling.

What I found challenging to stomach is how, after two films, we still don’t have an inkling of why and how the Joker became a Gotham master criminal and one of Batman’s nemesis. In the first film, we had Joker encounter a young Bruce Wayne - but nothing is made of that in this sequel. Half the film happens in a prison/hospital, and the other half in a courtroom.

As a result, while conceptually creative, this is relatively too safe of a sequel. The immense popularity of all the songs makes this a crazy sing-along. It’s like La La Land meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in a courtroom, with a supervillain attached to the project. The narrative is all over the place, and there’s more than a degree of irony when you have a judge insisting he will not let his courtroom be turned into a circus yet allow Fleck to defend himself and turn up in Joker make-up.

Phillips did well in the first film, turning his Gotham into a tribute to Scorsese films such as Taxi Driver and King of Comedy. We get the same tonal quality here, but it now feels repetitive, and I felt the film was too long by at least thirty minutes. This sequel may have sounded interesting on paper or as a departure from the first film, but I guess someone forgot to remind them that concept and merely being different aren’t enough.