The first Joker seemed to hate the world. Its sequel seems to hate its audience.

Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck isn’t a gangster warped by a swim in toxic chemicals or an anarchic super villain who wants to bring Gotham City to its knees. He’s a victim; a traumatized loner ground down by an abusive mother, a crappy job, and a home in a Gotham where he’s seemingly beaten up every time he leaves his apartment. When Arthur dressed like a clown and went on a killing spree, Joker treated his actions less like a shocking crime than inevitable poetic justice.

That idea resonated with audiences — Joker grossed more than $1 billion in theaters — even as some commentators (and movie theaters chains) fretted that the film could inspire copycat violence. For his sequel, Todd Phillips appears to have taken those accusations to heart, and conceived a story that puts his damaged anti-hero (and, by extension, Phillips’ movie) on trial. Not to spoil Joker: Folie à Deux, but it doesn’t exactly mount the most persuasive case in defense of its client.

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Audiences may find the whole film to be a trial. Joker: Folie à Deux feels like it was engineered to deliberately antagonize the audience that took vicarious pleasure in Arthur Fleck’s transformation into Gotham City folk hero. Set two years after the murder and mayhem in Joker, Arthur (Phoenix) remains locked up at Arkham State Hospital. The film’s first half follows his life behind bars. The second shifts to a Gotham City courtroom, where a parade of survivors from the first film take the stand against him.

Paying customers hoping to see Phoenix’s Joker unleashed upon the spoiled citizenry of Gotham City again will be sorely disappointed. Instead, Arthur’s — and the audience’s — only escape from Folie à Deux’s pervasive sense of confinement and claustrophobia comes from his budding relationship with another Arkham inmate he meets in the hospital’s music class.

Lee — Harley Quinn to her friends who read DC comics — spots Arthur shuffling through Arkham’s halls. At every opportunity, Lee flatters him, comforts him, and even sings with him — hushed versions of ancient showbiz standards like “That’s Entertainment” at first, then later full-blown musical numbers complete with elaborate choreography and stylized sets.

Folie à Deux briefly springs to life whenever Arthur and Lee launch into a duet. How could it not when it’s Lady Gaga playing Lee? Unfortunately, Gaga’s role is fairly small, and even less of it involves singing and dancing in lavish vintage costumes. (In Phillips’ conception here, cinematic fantasies offers only the briefest respite from the world’s overwhelmingly grim reality.)

Most of Gaga’s screen time is spent on her flirtations— or are they manipulations? — of Arthur; encouraging him to keep fighting and to embrace his Joker side. In her endless justifications of Arthur’s violent acts, her fawning obsequiousness over his bad jokes, not to mention her own clownish attire, she comes to resemble a cosplaying fangirl who’s obsessed with the first Joker movie, specifically one who didn’t get the memo that Arthur isn’t a figure to be emulated or admired.

As in Joker, Phoenix attacks this role like a man possessed. Refashioning his physicality yet again to suit a performance — Phoenix’s shoulder blades stick out so far from his emaciated frame he looks like he’s spent time hiding in a Parisian bell tower — the Oscar winner builds upon his earlier depiction of Arthur as a man for whom comedy is a beloved foreign language; he doesn’t know how to speak it himself, but he sure loves how it sounds. Punctuating scenes with an impulsive, high-pitched laugh, the Joker himself remains a genuinely chilling figure. But as in Joker, the world around Phoenix doesn’t recognize the depths of his madness — or if they do, they love him for it anyway. And Lee most of all.

Phillips’ meta interrogation of his own work, and the reasons why Gotham City might revere Joker like a cult leader, is a concept with a lot of potential. The songs are a fun twist as well — even if (or maybe because) they seem like the last thing hardcore Joker fans would want from a sequel. If the musical numbers had kept growing in ambition and scope, and the courtroom scenes had fully considered the ramifications of this villain’s massive popularity, Folie à Deux might have arrived at something genuinely exciting.

But just as the film seems to be approaching a real statement, it backs off. The trial scenes are dry and tedious; if there’s a joke here, it’s on the paying audience that has to sit through Arthur’s unfunny courtroom theatrics. And for all the talk about them in the run-up to Folie à Deux’s release, the songs are surprisingly timid. Only a handful go full golden age MGM musical number; the rest consist of Joker and Lee singing quietly to one another in dingy hallways or holding cells.

Of course, given the film’s venomous attitude toward the viewer, withholding those kind of superficial pleasures might be by design. It’s hard not to admire the perversity of all of these choices, as well as Phillips’ refusal to absolve himself or his film — especially if, as it’s been reported, Phillips convinced Warner Bros. to spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million on a film that borderline trolls anyone who loved Joker. Folie à Deux sums itself up in a line Joker says to Harley during one of their production numbers.

“I get the sneaking suspicion,” he tells her, “we’re not giving the people what they want.”

They’re sure not. At pretty much every step Folie à Deux feels like one big middle finger to fans of the original movie. I just wish it was less of a middle finger to the rest of us at the same time.

RATING: 4/10