Mediocre fanfic that's benefited from a sad bit of luck

Rating: 5/10 (26 October 2019)

If the familiies of survivors of the Aurora shooting hadn't dared to pipe up to suggest that maybe an ultraviolent movie called "Joker" portraying a murderous sociopath as a hero wasn't the greatest idea, triggering a backlash in which the alt-right felt it their duty to praise and promote the film as the greatest movie ever made (note the number of botlike 10/10 reviews surrounding this one), I'm guessing this picture would have come and gone by now. As it is, its spectacular first weekend box office has fallen off by an order of magnitude each following week, as word of mouth quietly overtook the fake hype crusade.
I think this film would definitely go over better with a young or less movie literate audience that wasn't already familiar with all the movies it borrows from--most obviously "Taxi Driver" and "King of Comedy," though I haven't yet seen anybody mention "American Psycho," from which it copped its have-its-cake-and-eat-it-too gimmick of suggesting that Arthur's antics are a figment of his imagination--OR ARE THEY?--after showing them to us as real. But beyond this, the really tiresome retread here is the whole concept of the antisocial, destructive man who is really a hero because...oh, never mind, it's not his fault, it's everybody else's somehow, and anyway isn't it cool the way he goes around wrecking everything? This isn't a revolutionary message, it's a socially irresponsible one. The use of music by convicted serial pedophile Gary Glitter on the soundtrack to me seals my belief that this was made on autopilot by not very bright people who never bothered to think through what they were putting on the screen.