Most Overrated Movie of the Year

Rating: 5/10 (28 November 2019)

Alright. I'm going to start this review by saying I went into this movie with an open mind. I'd heard very mixed things (despite the absurdly high rating that is somehow staying intact). I expected the performance to be impressive and the visuals to be great, both ended up true. Joaquin gives a great performance (at times really overdone but it's easy to overlook) and the cinematography is really good. Everything else about the movie was either bad or ok.
This movie has been out for a while and has hundreds of thousands of ratings, it is number 19 on the Top 250 films OF ALL TIME at the moment. That's simply asinine to me.
I called the twist (all the zazie beets stuff was in his head) within a few seconds of him meeting her. I literally said "every interaction he has with her is in his head" within literal seconds of him meeting her. This is indicative of poor writing and direction, as neither disguised any of the tricks the movie had up its sleeve. Then, when they reveal the twist, Phillips opts to literally bash you over the head with callbacks to the movie you just watched. Like we get it, man! This movie has 0 faith in it's audience to be intelligent moviegoers.
I know the comparisons have been made to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy a lot in relation to this movie, but man if this isn't a straight up direct remake of those two films then I'm on crack and have no idea. It honestly felt like the writers finished the script and realized "yo we just rewrote Taxi Driver lol" and because of that no company would pick up the script. So in order to sell the movie they made it a comic book movie (the literal go-to genre for guaranteed money in todays film world) and decided to rewrite the script set in gotham and about "Joker". The Thomas Wayne subplot that somehow takes up a quarter of the movie? What in the world was that? I felt like I was wasting my time while watching it. It felt so shoehorned in just to make sure the audience knows this is a DC Comics movie.
I knew how the movie would end before I saw it as well; I predicted he'd somehow commit some atrocious act and public opinion would split between supporting him and villifying him. And to be honest the reason I realized this is because I kept hearing that it was just a redone Taxi Driver/King of Comedy and, well, that's how both of those movies end (more or less).
Nothing about this movie was unique or innovative, it's a RIDICULOUSLY derivative dark character study that benefits from the fact that it's about the most famous comic book villain ever.
My plea is this: please rewatch this movie after seeing any other dark character study. Comic book fans who only watch superhero movies and have never seen a real character study before are the people I assume keep giving this movie 10/10's on this site. Anybody who has watched a character study before can recognize that this movie is mediocre at best. Don't just repeat what others say, this isn't a very good movie.