Joaquin Phoenix slays it in this slowly paced movie

Rating: 6/10 (3 October 2019)

"Joker" is a movie that features tons of well-done, entertaining and well acted scenes... but it's a bit disappointing for me in terms of story and pacing.
Let me state the obvious: Joaquin Phoenix delivers an amazing performance throughout this picture. He does capture the essence of the character that the movie displays onscreen and every line he delivers is done so in a brilliant manner.
The cinematography and camerawork is also pretty solid and the color palette makes this film look darker and more grounded than most DC outputs. Overall, the presentation of "Joker" blends well with the tone and it's a satisfying departure from other Todd Phillips' movies, which are more directed towards the comedy genre.
However, as excited I was for this movie, I can't stop to think how much more I wanted out of the movie after it ended. The pacing is not terrible by any means, but often times it seems as though some scenes felt unnecessary. It's accurate to call this a character-driven film, but even movies like these may suffer from sequences that could have been cut and nothing would have been lost.
The insertion of the Wayne drama and how they connected to the Joker character was not a particularly interesting part for me, but it got even worse in the end when they show once again the origin of Batman. It was really redundant and it takes us back to my previous point about some scenes being useless.
I'm sure the movie wanted its audience to feel sympathy towards the main character and they successfully did that, but it was only because the secondary/background characters were nothing more than stereotypical props who, for no reason at all, just think it's intelligent to start beating somebody up with no concern of what consequences they might face. All those extras who beat up Joaquin Phoenix's character in the beginning of the film are exactly like that - clichéd props. There's no real reason to not side with Arthur because everyone around him treats him like garbage in a very over-the-top way.
Those issues aside - the "Joker" movie is a solid entry in the DC track record and it might change my score upon rewatch, but I certainly wasn't fond of some elements of it.
6/10.