Joker: Not Good

The collective cultural amnesia required to elevate Todd Phillips’ Joker to the pantheon of cinematic masterpieces is, frankly, exhausting. Let’s be entirely real for a single, unvarnished second: this movie isn’t a magnum opus; it’s a symptom. It is an aggressively mediocre, derivative exercise in cinematic recycling that only looks like a towering monolith because it is standing in a vast, desolate desert of absolute caped-crusader garbage.

When your baseline for cinematic consumption is a decade of green-screen slurry and corporate focus-grouped assembly lines, a film that merely remembers it’s allowed to have a color palette and a cello soundtrack feels like a divine revelation. But it’s not. It’s just mid.

The entire narrative architecture of this film is so painfully hollowed-out and structurally anorexic that it could have easily been compressed into a tight, twenty-minute Vimeo short film. Instead, we are subjected to two hours of Joaquin Phoenix dynamically emaciating his ribcage and performing impromptu, pseudo-intellectual interpretive dances to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s admittedly gorgeous, but wildly overworked, score. It’s a repetitive loop of aestheticized misery—Arthur gets beat up, Arthur laughs painfully, Arthur smokes a cigarette in a dimly lit stairwell, rinse, repeat until the inevitable, telegraphed nihilism finally boils over.

Phillips essentially hoovered up the celluloid scraps of Martin Scorsese’s far superior Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, ran them through a grimdark Instagram filter, and served the resultant paste to an audience starved for anything resembling auteur television. It’s a pastiche of prestige. The script trades entirely in a sophomoric, surface-level dialectic about “society” that feels less like biting social commentary and more like the livejournal musings of an edgy seventeen-year-old who just discovered Nietzsche.

It is the cinematic equivalent of a gentrified coffee shop charging eight dollars for a pour-over that tastes exactly like Folgers, but because the barista has a mustache and the walls are exposed brick, the local bourgeoisie convince themselves they are tasting notes of bergamot and revolution. Joker didn’t break the mold; it just bought the mold from a thrift store, upcycled it with a nihilistic veneer, and sold it back to a pop-culture landscape too intellectually malnourished to recognize the grift.

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Oh my god, can we also talk about the absolute, excruciating slowness of it all? It’s like Phillips discovered the concept of slow-motion and decided it was a substitute for actual narrative momentum.

The film operates on this suffocatingly smug frequency, utterly convinced of its own transgressive genius when it is actually just regurgitating the most basic, entry-level cinematic tropes. It’s an exercise in aesthetic masturbation. We are trapped in this solipsistic echo chamber of Arthur’s mind, forced to endure endless, turgid scenes of him staring vacantly into mirrors. It’s not profound character development; it’s just narrative stalling. They literally stretched a napkin-sketch of a plot into a two-hour marathon of unrelenting bleakness just because they knew the Marvel-addled public would mistake a lack of jokes for artistic depth.

And the discourse! Oh my god, the discourse surrounding this movie was a toxic sludge of manufactured controversy that served only to mask the absolute vacancy at the film’s core. It masquerades as this dangerous, incendiary piece of counter-culture art, but at the end of the day, it’s still just a corporate commodity securely tethered to the Warner Bros. intellectual property machine. It wants all the indie-sleaze street cred of a 1970s New Hollywood psychodrama while simultaneously cashing those sweet, sweet superhero merchandising checks.

It’s just so incredibly tiring to watch the cultural zeitgeist collectively hyperventilate over a film that is essentially the cinematic equivalent of someone loudly reading a Wikipedia summary of psychoanalysis in a crowded room. It’s a tedious, self-aggrandizing chore of a viewing experience, and the fact that I’m still expected to treat it as a watershed moment in modern cinema makes me want to scream into a void. It is a monument to our current cultural bankruptcy—a film that succeeds not through its own merit, but merely by being slightly less embarrassing than the rest of the cinematic slop we are forced to consume.

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Oh my god, I am actually suffocating just thinking about how this film’s sycophants weaponize its supposed “bravery.” It is an absolute, unmitigated psychological tax to exist in a world that validates this drivel. The entire enterprise is steeped in a suffocatingly bourgeois savior complex, wherein Phillips fancies himself a cinematic iconoclast shattering the Hegelian dialectic of modern multiplex entertainment. But oh my god, he isn’t. It’s a simulacrum of depth, a hollowed-out totem erected to appease the visually illiterate.

And the cinematography—oh my god, don’t even get me started on the sycophantic praise heaped upon Lawrence Sher’s camera work. It is nothing more than a derivative pastiche of neo-noir affectation, utilizing a sickly, bilious color palette of jaundiced yellows and cyanic greens to telegraph a state of psychological decay that the narrative itself is too cowardly to actually articulate. It’s a visual filibuster. It forces the audience into a state of aesthetic hypnosis, distracting them from the realization that they are watching an empty vessel spinning its wheels in a puddle of muddy, uninspired angst.

It is an egregious insult to the avant-garde, a commodified rebellion that operates entirely within the safe, sanitized parameters of institutionalized Hollywood nepotism. The fact that this aggressively pedestrian, middlebrow artifact is heralded as a triumph of contemporary auteurism doesn’t just disappoint me; it fundamentally erodes my faith in the collective aesthetic consciousness. It’s a tedious, multi-million-dollar temper tantrum that could have been summarized in a single, deeply embarrassing tweet.

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Verdict

Oh my god, I am literally clawing at my own skin just trying to process the sheer, unadulterated mediocrity of it all. We live in an era where the average theatrical release is the aesthetic and intellectual equivalent of watching a mandatory, six-hour colonoscopy of a deceased, unhoused person—just an utterly grim, lifeless, deeply invasive crawl through stagnant, rotting corporate waste. It is a damning indictment of our collective cultural malnutrition. Joker doesn’t possess any intrinsic artistic velocity; it merely benefits from the absolute, crushing gravitational pull of the garbage surrounding it.

But then—oh my god—you actually buy the ticket. You commit to the feature film. And the reality of that choice is a violent, catastrophic derailment. Watching the actual movie isn’t just observing the tragedy; it is actively, psychotically swerving your vehicle directly into the rotting carcass.

It is a split-second of pure horror followed by the sickening, concussive thud of impact. The film doesn’t just disappoint you; it violently detonates upon contact with your consciousness. Suddenly, the windshield is entirely obliterated by a tidal wave of putrid, focus-grouped viscera. You are trapped in the wreckage, completely incapacitated, covered in the steaming, unholy fluids of a dead corporate product, screaming at the top of your lungs in absolute, existential agony while the wipers futilely smear the biological debris across your field of vision.