Promising movie bogged down by sloppy writing and editing

Rating: 6/10 (26 October 2019)

Almost everyone who appreciates the whole Batman realm has at one time or another considered that a stand alone movie about the Joker character's origins would be great. I know this is not an opinion of the majority, but Joker doesn't quite make it to "great". This movie feels sloppy (for some reason this word just seems to fit). Some might say that calling this movie sloppy is not appreciating the abstract element of Joker; but there is good abstract, and there is just plain old sloppy writing..
For example, the first hour of this movie seemed sloppily edited together: you could chop apart every scene in the first hour of Joker and edit them together in any random order and the storyline would still be confusing and the pace of the movie woul still drag. Some occasional definition of what Arthur Fleck was imagining and what was real would have helped.
This movie spent too much of the first half establishing Arthur's relationship with his mother. And after all the screen time given to this storyline, we still really don't know if he was adopted or not. This is true of most of the plot lines in Joker. Again, to me Joker felt less like a movie with abstract conclusions that challenge the viewer to fill in the blanks than a sloppily written and edited collection of dead ends. For movies like 'the Hangover' franchise (also from director Todd Phillips) sloppy works great, but not for Joker.
In an alternate universe, wouldn't it be interesting see see what kind of movies would have been made if director Todd Phillips was making a movie combining King of Comedy and Taxi Driver ( which Joker is obviously heavily influenced by) and left the Batman realm out of it completely? And at the same time, (in this alternate universe) director Tim Burton is writing and directing a stand-alone movie about the origins the the Joker character? It can't be argued that the results would be interesting!
It seems that Joker is "given a free pass" on some of it's shortcomings possibly because, as I said at the beginning of this review, a lot of Batman fans including myself, had been thinking (in the back of their minds at least) how great a movie dedicated to the Joker's story could be. And it could have been.