Spoilers below. Frankly, I’m not sure how I could talk about this movie without giving away at least one major plot point.
I’m going to write using a bunch of one- or two-sentence paragraphs to give anyone who might read this a chance to bail before they read something they don’t want to see.
First of all, the biggest surprise of the film: I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t great, but I thought it held together better that the first film.
Second: Despite what Todd Phillips might say, this absolutely is a musical. A jukebox musical where the male lead isn’t a very strong singer, but a musical nonetheless.
Joker (2019) showed that Fleck is a VERY unreliable narrator. This movie doesn’t try to hide that. Almost all of the musical numbers are imaginary. That’s fine and good, but they were too timid about Fleck’s grasp on reality. I really wanted more “wait- is this real?” scenes.
There are some really silly moments – including some very unlikely decisions by the judge about courtroom behavior, and by some guards about inmate interactions – but the movie mostly stays in “real world” mode.
Okay, let’s do the big spoiler.
The spoiler for the end of the movie.
Seriously, the last scene. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know how it ends.
At the end of the movie, Fleck has declared that Joker was completely made up, and has admitted to killing six people. As he walks down a hallway, another prisoner stops him to tell Fleck a joke. As he tells the punchline, he stabs Fleck multiple times. Fleck falls and dies, and out of focus in the background the other inmate laughs and cuts his mouth to match Heath Ledger’s scars in The Dark Knight. Were these movies secret prequels to Christopher Nolan’s Batman films? Is that random prisoner the “real” Joker, and Fleck just a setup? It doesn’t quite make sense, and it doesn’t really need to. It’s also pretty funny for a director to say use the last five minutes of his film to say “By the way, nothing you saw up to this point had anything to do with the character you thought you were learning about.”