Boring and irrelevant

Rating: 4/10 (8 October 2019)

Joker is anything but a masterpiece, although it certainly takes itself seriously enough and it tries harder than any movie in recent memory to be one (maybe the recent Star is Born tries harder). But I found it largely languorous, psychopathic in its intent and subsequent failure to move me on any level and, well, not worth even a laugh.
I don't know what the point of this film is, since it doesn't really work as Batman lore, providing a shoddy psychological construct around the Joker's origins, and if the idea was to top either Nicholson or Ledger it failed me (Nolan's Joker vision is far more nihilistic, seemingly coming from nowhere, with a twisted, brutal sense of humor about him.) Here we are meant to empathize with poor disgruntled Arthur Fleck, which might have been easier had he not been fed so many obvious motivations for his disgruntlement, and propped up by such lazy writing.
If Joker is meant to 'be a mirror' to our times, it fails again, to say anything relevant or novel about society, or about the US, or the mental health system or anything really that hasn't been said a million times before, and instead seems focused on taking itself really really seriously, and wants us to find sequences of the Joker dancing to Gary Glitter edgy and bombastic, when really these sequences are dull and incongruent deadweight.
Fans will lambast the haters of this film, but frankly I was bored by its flat embrace of pointless amorality. I wanted better, more biting satire, more layers, more motivation. Instead we get superficial, ultra-violent and pointless dreck which says and means nothing, even while it looks swell, has a great cast and seemingly all the ingredients are in order. But maybe that's the trade off for giving the reigns of such a film to the Hangover director.