Abusive

Rating: 1/10 (4 March 2020)

Characters that suffer abuse can be a good element in a plot. But audience should never suffer abuse. The audience needs to experience catharsis in the end. And this never happens with 'Joker'. The film has a huge problem, which it never manages to solve: it wants to be realistic and tell the tale of an innocent, abused individual who snaps; but it also wants to exist within a fictional universe in which this man is as much of an abuser as he is a victim. And this creates problems for the screenwriters that they never manage to solve. Thus Joker comes across as a sympathetic character first, but turns to a vicious killer towards the end, at which point everyone becomes confused, and stops liking him. There is no redemption of any kind, no satisfying emotional resolution, only a brutal ending which serves the purposes of the wider franchise and doesn't deliver on its own terms. In the end, the character we were made to empathize with becomes nothing but a caricature in a silly superhero universe. And that is an insult to anyone who invested in the character from the beginning. The audience is cheated. Also, one should note the disturbing anarchist/communist vibe in the film - the idea that it's better to burn down the world than allow their particular understanding of 'injustice' to go on. I may pity Joker and hate the cynical Wayne, but I won't put degenerate, mentally ill clown in charge of an angry mob that wants to burn everything down.