Joker: Folie á Deux may have bombed at the box office as well as with audiences and critics alike, but the follow up to 2019’s Joker has a fan in Quentin Tarantino. During an appearance on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast (via Variety), Tarantino had high praise for Joker 2, commenting not only that he “really really liked it” but also calling the film’s director Todd Phillips the real joker for delivering a “f-ck you” to comic book geeks, Hollywood, DC, and Warner Bros as well.
“I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking,’ Tarantino said. “But I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is. And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or that’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were. I find myself listening to the lyrics of ‘For Once in My Life’ in a way I never have before.”
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“The Joker directed the movie. The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right?” Tarantino said about Phillips being the real “joker” of the sequel film. “And then his big surprise gift — haha! — the jack-in-the-box, when he offers you his hand for a handshake and you get a buzzer with 10,000 volts shooting you — is the comic book geeks. He’s saying f-ck you to all of them. He’s saying f-ck you to the movie audience. He’s saying f-ck you to Hollywood. He’s saying f-ck you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Bros. … And Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”
[RELATED: No, Joker: Folie à Deux Is Not a Dark Knight Prequel]
Tarantino’s comments are a bit of a contrast to his thoughts about 2019’s Joker. The filmmaker previously said that the first film was “a little one-note” and made commentary about the film’s referencing of ‘70s films such as Taxi Driver, questioning at the time “Is this where we live now? Take great movies from the ‘70s and redo them as pop-cultural artifacts?” That said, he did have significant praise for the film’s talks how scene, which he praised at the time for its subversiveness — specifically “subversion on a massive level”. Comparing the two reactions to the two films, it would seem that what Tarantino is most appreciative of with the Joker films are their approaches to the audience by not doing what one would expect – and sees him coming around to the idea that both films are, ultimately, good.
It would also seem that Tarantino is homing in on what, for some, is the real point of
Joker: Folie á Deux and that is to serve as an antidote for the hype around the film and the character, hype that started with the first Joker film and only seemed to intensify as expectation for the sequel grew. As we have noted before, the Joker sequel is as much social commentary as it is commentary on entertainment itself and the gap between reality and pop-culture obsession, especially with Joker. If nothing else, it certainly makes for an interesting lens with which to look at the film beyond what one may have expected – and one that may well ultimately see viewers revisiting their own thoughts about Joker: Folie a Deux, coming around to see the film as more than originally considered.
