Before its Friday release date, Todd Phillips' Joker took home the the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. It also took a lot of flak from people who feared the origin story of a comic book antihero would glorify angry loners. With the curtain now pulled, critics are offering a mixed bag of appreciation and, well, aversion. Four takes:
- Dana Stevens can't help but wonder at all the discussion. "Predictable, clichéd, deeply derivative of other, better movies, and overwritten to the point of self-parody," Joker is a "grimy and relentlessly downbeat fable … too slight, aesthetically and morally, to bear the weight of all those months of debate," she writes at Slate, describing a "highly unpleasant" viewing owing to the "claustrophobia and boredom."
- "The movie isn't even a little interested in what makes its female characters tick," which Chris Hewitt sees as "a missed opportunity, especially in a movie that treads as much familiar ground as Joker." Indeed, "the lack of originality becomes glaring in a few scenes." Still, "Phillips made a brilliant choice in casting [Joaquin] Phoenix," who "gives the performance of his career," Hewitt writes at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.