A dark supervillain tour de force or merely a grim couple of hours at the cinema?

Rating: 6/10 (5 November 2019)

So I just watched it for the first time, weeks after it's release. Wanted to wait for the hype to settle down.
Unfortunately I felt like I'd seen just about all there was to see in the trailers. They were so effective, that I didn't really get much more from the movie.
An intense and, at time's, unsettling performance from Phoenix.
I can't help but feel that if you take the Joker label from it; take it out of the superhero/ villain context, it's an unnecessarily bleak and miserable experience, punctuated by violence used to generate some moments of shock and horror just to create some dynamism. Some have said that the movie is more of a commentary on society; a movie in the tradition of Taxi Driver and Falling Down. Of course, if it wasn't a super villain movie, it'd bomb at the box office and fall completely flat, as, if taken in that context, it's not a great film at all.
It is what it is. A darker change of pace (and often grim) for a movie in the superhero genre.
Take it out of that genre and it's just grim.