Taxidriver 2

Rating: 8/10 (2 October 2019)

Here's my review of Joker , or Taxidriver 2 if I'm being honest . So " Joker " is directed by Todd Philips , who's best known for directing the hangover trilogy , due date and war dogs. I thought he was an oddball choice when it was first announced but I get why . The movie stars Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck , a guy who is constantly tormented by society , and he was great ! .... As Arthur Fleck , but as the joker ? Well that's for you to decide . For me personally I thought he was good , definitely better than Leto's , but in b/w Ledger and Nicholson. The character of joker has has had many origins over his comic book and media appearances . From ' Gotham's ' Jerome valeska ' to Jack Napier , to the mobster from mask of the Phantasm. But the most popular ones are him falling into a pit of acid and the other one about him being a failed stand up comedian which then leads to the acid fall according to ' The killing Joke' by Alan Moore. This movie takes the failed stand up comedian thing from that , drops the acid thing and then sets up it's story , Which I thought was a really nod cause Joker's mainstream origin is now as familiar as Batman's origin. They also set up Batman's origin indirectly to the Joker's which I thought was personally brilliant . This movie justifies Joker's maniacal forced laugh as a medical condition and at one point brings in the question of whether it's legit or if he's faking it . Unlike other iterations the joker is more sane than other people , like from this scene at a comedy club where he's the only guy laughing at the good jokes and everyone else is laughing at the inappropriate ones , so he writes that fact down. This movie borrows a lot of themes from fight club such as the whole " only when you lose everything are you free to do anything " and many more. It's also very similar to Nightcrawler in terms of being an underdog story and in making us root for the underdog even though he's a cold blooded merciless. Which is funny because Nightcrawler was a modern take on Taxidriver and this movie is like 80% Taxidriver with the whole experimenting with your gun without a shirt on , the one liners , the philosophical talks , the gun on your temple gesture and lots more . The movie even has frickin Robert De Niro as a late night show host if you want more proof , which is ironic since De Niro plays a failed comedian who gets insulted by a show host in ' the king of comedy ' directed by scorcesse who also directed Taxidriver . God ! My head hurts. Yeah , so I did some googling and it turns out scorcesse helped out with the script . So it all makes sense now . I also liked how Joaquin Phoenix was able to go back and forth between his actual laugh and his medical condition laugh which is similar yet you can spot the difference from how the latter is soulless. That's some brilliant stuff there. I also liked how Phoenix was able make us hope he doesn't get beat up by people in a public train to hoping he doesn't kill that guy. The only gripes I had with this movie was that the soundtrack wasn't powerful enough when it needed to be and that in the third act in a TV studio set , Phoenix was overdoing it. In the end ' Joker ' isn't the best origin for the character , it's a movie which uses the characters label to gain hype for a Taxidriver spinoff which is amazing ! All that stuff I said about the movie being close to Taxidriver is not a critique. Because this movie is brilliant . So it's a great attempt to dive into the psyche of an anarchist and make you wonder .... Chaos is just order yet undeciphered.