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Joker: Folie à Deux has been a major bomb at the box office, earning scathing reviews from fans and critics alike. But it has at least one big fan in director Quentin Tarantino, who praised the unfortunate sequel at length on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, calling it the “Natural Born Killers I would have dreamed of seeing.”
“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.
He continued, “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.”
Tarantino, who apparently wasn’t a fan of the original outside of its final scene, saw Joker 2 in an “almost empty IMAX theater,” which enabled him to “laugh without bothering anybody.” While Tarantino has directed some of the best movies of all time, he’s also noted for his affection for grindhouse cinema and films that critics might otherwise reject. Joker 2 seems to fit the bill, with Tarantino praising star Joaquin Phoenix for “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life” while comparing director Todd Phillips to the Joker.
“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. “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 fuck you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers… and Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”
On that last point, especially, Joker 2 has been quite controversial. While Phillips said the film was “never about addressing toxic fandom,” he reportedly refused to work with DC Studios on the project. Fans, for their part, have uniformly rejected Joker 2, with the film ultimately pulled in around $201 million in the global box office — a massive drop from the billion dollar success of the original movie.
“The worst thing about Joker: Folie à Deux is its unfulfilled potential. It begins with the promise of a novel approach to the Joker and Harley Quinn, placing them in a world where the opposite of cruelty is musical romance,” we wrote in our review. “Unfortunately, the DC sequel gets bogged down by a lengthy courtroom saga, which not only keeps the dazzling Lady Gaga away from the spotlight, but centers the movie entirely around its own predecessor, without doing or saying anything new.”
Like other films that have bombed at the box office, Joker 2 is already on its way to digital and home video. As for Tarantino, his 10th and final film remains up in the air in the wake of his shocking decision to scrap The Movie Critic back in April.
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.