Joker (2019) Review - Part I (Binge in the time of Corona)

Captain Passive spends 90 minutes getting the shot kicked out of him and 30 minutes shooting people who don’t deserve it. He acts like vermin, gets treated like vermin, and incites fear of the mentally handicapped. Thank you Captain Passive, you fear mongering dipshit!

Everyone can have a really, really, really contrived day

He has a bad job, and then he’s robed, and then he’s beaten, and then he has a mental illness, and his boss wants to fire him, and then he drops the gun at work, and then he gets fired, and then he gets beat on the train, then he is finally active he shoots 3 people and it seems like the movie is about to start, but there are another 40 minutes of confusing character building and slow torture of the protagonist and audience alike.

And then his mental health care is discontinued, and then he's a failure as a stand-up comedian, and then the talk show host humiliates him on air, and then his girlfriend is Tyler Durden, and then he's not Donald Wayne's son, I mean Thomas Trump’s son, and then he was abused as a child. I guess it can really happen to anyone who’s stuck in a badly written script with a metric fuck ton of contrived bad luck to justify random violence.

Dead inside

There is no part of a movie I would come back to see, to emotion inspired, no lesson taught, no message conveyed. Arthur Fleck is the new Lara Croft, as in "if we kick enough shit out of the point of view character the audience will think it’s sympathetic character development by Stockholm syndrome" and it fails just the same. Without vulnerability and active resistance to give the struggle relatability, you might as well film crotch shots for 90 minutes. And unlike Lara Croft, there is no adventure to accompany the shit-kicking, there is a boring and empty man whose most heroic moment is accidentally saving a woman from rape because of his uncontrollable laughter. He wants to be a comedian and he is terrible at it; his material is bad, and his delivery is bad, and on top of that he can’t stop laughing. I can’t cheer for his stand-up comic career; he doesn’t really try.

“But he’s an everyman trodden on until he snaps, he’s supposed to suck at everything” snarks the movie. No, he’s supposed to have at least one merit and fail to be recognized for it so we can go, “how unfair.” Or he has a good heart so we’ll like him, but he doesn’t even try to defend a woman from rape, so I can’t cheer for him as a good person. The script keeps sending this stupid, miserable, hopeless, worthless, soulless fuckup into bad luck for 90 minutes thinking I’m gonna be on his side, wanting him to get his revenge Dogville style. The script thinks abuse of protagonist fills up a sympathy bar in my head until I call for the blood of his tormentors. But he is so incompetent that it's like rolling Steven Hawking to a tap-dancing contest and expecting me to cheer for him because he really wants it.

"But if we fund mental healthcare, he'll get the help he needs to fulfill his dreams!" No, he won't! He wrote down his material when he got the help he needed, it's bad. He performed his material badly in the scene after his medicine is cut off, and it doesn't affect him, he has the same uncontrollable laughter that he had when medicated. The only thing that helped was going off his pills and murder, and I'm not for the Arkham doctors to start prescribing that.

After 90 minutes of the world kicking his incompetent ass, this isn't an underdog story, it's Old Yeller, Arthur Fleck can't get any better, shoot him in the head.