Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in a crazy musical

In Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips' desperate, darkly irreverent, but actually quite bumpy and down-to-earth musical sequel to Joker, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the sad incel who has turned into a self-made psycho killer version of the Joker, is about to go on trial for his crimes. In theory, that would be a good thing, since Arthur doesn't get out much. At Arkham State Hospital, he lives in a small, filthy cell from which he is released every morning so he can sneak down the hall with his bucket of urine and pour it into a sink. Arthur is now just skin and bones, his face lined with despair. The guards, led by the dashing sadist Jackie (Brendan Gleeson), keep asking him, “Do you have a Joke for us today?” But Arthur has no more jokes and no more smiles. He is once again a prime example of miserabism.

Of course, he's famous now, too—so famous, for killing late-night talk show host Murray Franklin live on television, that a TV movie was actually made about him. “Everyone still thinks you're a star,” Jackie says. And he's right. The whole world knows who Arthur is. Lots of people hate him, but at least one person in Arkham, an inmate named Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), with two-toned platinum hair and a look of shaggy desperation, adores him. She's seen that TV movie countless times. When he walks into the room, her eyes light up. The rest of the world might think he's a nutcase, but she looks at him and sees… the Joker.

Arthur's trial is sure to be a media event. It is to be broadcast live on television, and in preparation Arthur undergoes an interview in prison with Paddy Meyers (Steve Coogan), a tabloid figure who provokes and mocks him. Arthur responds by singing in a dry, cracking voice, “I'm wild again, beguiled again…” and then launching into “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” from the 1940 musical Pal Joey. If you're surprised to hear him reaching for such an old-fashioned songbook, get used to it. Many of the songs Arthur sings in Folie à Deux – “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” “That's Entertainment!” – sound like they're from your grandmother's record collection.

The trial finally begins, and it all revolves around one central question. No one denies that Arthur Murray killed Franklin and four other people; even Arthur admits it. The only question is whether he will be declared insane, which would save him from the death penalty. His lawyer, played by the tough Catherine Keener, argues that Arthur did not really commit the crimes because he has a split personality, a disturbed alter ego, a hidden identity that takes over him. But Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) argues that Arthur is not not has a split personality. He is not two people, says Dent. He is just the sick, sad Arthur. That is why he must be held accountable for his actions and found guilty.

That debate is the linchpin of Joker: Folie à Deux. It's even announced in the film's opening sequence: a mock Warner Bros. cartoon from the '40s in which a Broadway version of Arthur is literally taken over by his murderous shadow behind the scenes (all to the tune of “Me and My Shadow”). But the reason it's odd and rather unexciting to hear the film chew over the split personality question ad nauseam is that Joker has already dredged it up in a most spectacular way. The premise of the first film, which treats Arthur as a sleazy sociopath from a Scorsese fever dream, is that, unlike the dark side characters in comic book movies, Arthur is actually Was just a disturbed human being. Even when he put on his smeared clown makeup and red suit, he wasn't a larger-than-life villain. He was a regular loser pretending to be a larger-than-life villain.

And yet … the black magic of the film was so strong that this DIY Joker felt so much power flowing through him that he strangely did became the Joker. Was he a split personality or just a lonely sick man? The delicious answer is that he was both.

And that's exactly what we're waiting for in Folie à Deux: Arthur, the ordinary madman, who somehow transcends himself by assuming his identity as the Joker. The disappointment of the film is how little it lets us feel that. There are many scenes in which Arthur is dressed as the Joker, defending himself in the courtroom, singing this or that song, sometimes in fantasy songs that almost play out in his head. But his presence is no longer dangerous. He's not trying to kill anyone, nor is he leading a revolution. He's just singing and (sometimes) dancing his way into his Joker daydream.

In Joker, after Arthur shot the three men on the subway, he ducked into a dingy public toilet and did this crazy Tai Chi dance that expressed his newfound power. He felt relaxed, released, reborn in his violence. In that moment, he became the Joker.

A musical number can do something similar. It is there to elevate ordinary characters – to bring them (and us) into contact with the power of their secret selves. What we see more than ever in contemporary film musicals – what we feel – is that the characters develop an emotion and high-flying with it. We want to see it transformed. In our time, Moulin Rouge! was the film that rewrote the rules of the experience. The beauty, the outrageousness, the aesthetic collisions (the fact that Parisian dancers and turn-of-the-century bohemians sang “Lady Marmalade” and “Your Song”) were all part of the transcendence. There was a hint of the same exhilaration in Lars von Trier's musical Dancer in the Dark, where female sacrifice meets Björk.

I'm not saying every modern movie musical has to be like this. I really enjoyed “Hairspray” and “Chicago.” But the premise of “Joker: Folie à Deux” – that Arthur, the killer clown, and his lover Lee (who starts to think she's Harley Quinn) express who they are by becoming jukebox songbirds… I'm sorry, but that's not a Broadway concept. It's a bold Concept. It's one that requires bold execution. And that largely doesn't happen in “Folie à Deux.”

Phillips, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver, should have chosen a wilder selection of songs. And the song choice that suggests this is the ultimate pinprick in “Joker”: this excerpt from Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” as Joker dances down the West 167th Street Step Stairs. That was perhaps the film’s greatest moment. It was the decisive one. When Phillips announced that “Joker 2” would be a musical, it was no longer obvious that this is the scene that should have been the guiding principle of the sequel?

There are a few scenes in “Folie à Deux” that hint at what the film should have been: an edition of “The Joker and Harley Show” in which the two, à la Sonny and Cher, sing “To Love Somebody” by the Bee Gees, or the gospel number “Gonna Build a Mountain” which Gaga sings brilliantly. Most of the songs in “Folie à Deux”, however, don't break out, shake us up and make our eyes light up. And they don't make us swoon.

The casting of Lady Gaga certainly sounded promising, because she's a great actress and was sent out into the world to do musicals (among other things). But Gaga, who has a wonderful, effortless presence in “Folie à Deux,” is drastically underused. Her Lee never really gets going. Gaga has a nice quiet moment singing “(They Long to Be) Close to You.” (Speaking of Burt Bacharach, why did Phillips waste one of his few choice musical choices, “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” on that opening cartoon?) But the number doesn't build. Gaga never gets the chance to do what she did in “A Star Is Born”: grip the audience with her rapture.

I should mention that not enough is happening in “Folie à Deux”. The film is two hours and 18 minutes long, and here is the entire plot:

Arthur is wasting away in Arkham State Hospital. He meets Lee, who devotes herself to him. He is put on trial and the debate ensues as to whether he is a split personality or just a criminal. A verdict is passed. A fateful bomb explodes. The end.

As a critic, I've seen my share of debates, but I never understood why the criticism of Joker was morally judgmental. That the film invited us to identify deeply with a twisted sociopath was, in my opinion, not a weakness, but a strength. (It's the same reason I love Bonnie and Clyde, Taxi Driver, and Natural Born Killers.) The film was, among other things, an allegory for the Trump era, but it's almost as if the critics were saying, “We don't like the film because Arthur is a nasty incel who leads an insurrection just like Trump!” To me, the criticisms of Joker were like a studio executive taking notes that essentially said, “Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull isn't likable enough.”

Have critics turned into cautious critics with Joker? In my opinion, yes. But the bottom line is that Todd Phillips listened to them—and that's a big mistake, in my opinion. Joker: Folie à Deux may be ambitious and outrageous on the surface, but at its core it's an overcautious sequel. Phillips has made a film in which Arthur is really just poor Arthur; he does nothing wrong and won't threaten anyone's moral sensibilities. In fact, he botches the only good thing that ever happened to him—winning the love of Lee's Harley Quinn—because he denies the Joker within himself. He's now just a singing, dancing clown puppeteer living in his imagination. Is The Entertainment? I suspect audiences will still flock to Folie à Deux. But when it comes to daring mainstream films, the critics have the last laugh.