When I saw “Joker” at the Venice Film Festival five years ago, I felt extreme and outraged outrage, and I poured out that outrage — as some readers found inappropriate in a hastily written review. (I was later informed that I could have taken some time to calm down: a review embargo on the film remained in effect for five hours after I turned in my notice.) Not wanting to give away any plot spoilers, I did so don’t reveal the main source of my outrage.

What threw me for a loop was the climax of the film, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, now almost the Joker, appears on a late-night talk show hosted by dashing showman Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). Franklin’s goal is to mock the man in clown makeup. But Arthur has the last laugh: he pulls out a gun and blows Franklin’s brains out on live television.

This shocked me in a very not good way. Partly because I was pretty sure this plot point was inspired by the on-air suicide of Pennsylvania politician R. Budd Dwyer in 1987. The footage of him taking his own life was, of course, edited for news reports, but I was enough of a media insider at the time to be able to view the unexplained footage of the suicide. And to this day I wish I hadn’t. The similarities between the real event and what director Todd Philips staged seemed too specific to be coincidental. I thought what Phillips and Phoenix (and yes, De Niro) did was unforgivable opportunistic nihilism.

So there you have it, in case you were wondering. In my review I wrote: “In today’s mainstream films, ‘dark’ is just another flavor. Like “edgy”, it is an option that you use depending on which market you want to reach. And it’s especially useful when integrated into the comic book genre.”

And now I’m back on the Joker beat for the sequel, Joker: Folie a Deux, which, as you’ve no doubt heard, is a musical written and directed by Todd Phillips, like the first film. Luckily, Phillips didn’t write the songs. This is mostly a jukebox musical with excerpts from the Great American Songbook (“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered”), international pop of the 60s (“To Love Somebody”, originally by the Bee Gees and further popularized by Janis Joplin) and more. And the best I can say about it is that it obviously doesn’t take marketing as it is conventionally understood into account

Before we delve into why it ultimately makes sense to make the second Joker film a musical, we should acknowledge that his reasoning is quite sound. That is, Arthur Fleck, who here makes a strict distinction between himself as a civilian and himself as a “Joker,” is a deeply disturbed individual whose warped imagination could easily imagine his existence as part of a show. So we can admit that the filmmakers are acting in good faith by calling this a musical. This way they can get out of otherwise desperate situations. The film is narratively, psychologically and aesthetically incoherent. Still, it can slip into the first two categories because musicals, by their very nature, you know, musicals, can get away with being narratively and psychologically incoherent.

As it always reminds you, the story takes place almost immediately after the sickening murder that climaxed “Joker.” Arthur/Joker is trapped in one of Arkham’s dark, satanic, mill-like mental institutions, and on one of his walks to meet a visitor, he is practically winked at by a young woman singing in an open room. This is Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel (DC cognoscenti may be upset that she never goes full Harley Quinn here), and the two soon conspire to escape Arthur’s trial, where Lee is mysteriously suddenly granted citizen status, like this to see a lot of each other, as captivity allows us to be there as a spectator. (This is adequately explained, if not entirely believable.) Arthur is grinning and grumpy when he’s not wearing his Joker makeup, but rest assured, he can often express it, whether in song fantasies or in the Reality of the process. And then he says, well, “Joker.”

The trial and the romance are the lynchpins of this seemingly endless film. There are parts – such as Joker’s portrayal of a slow-witted Southern lawyer – that might have been entertaining had they not been set in what appears to be the eighth or ninth hour of the film. In the end, the wafer-thin story boils down to the same nihilistic sleaze that Phillips served up in the first Joker, albeit remixed in terms of genre.

Some early reviews have complained that the film doesn’t offer much “Joker fan service.” This makes me laugh a little; I understand that the character is actually a pop culture phenomenon and is in fact fictional, but considering what he’s about, what exactly would “Joker Fan Service” mean? You might as well talk about “Charles Manson Fan Service.” It is certainly a sick and twisted world we live in.

The only other aspect of the film that I can say is positive, aside from its indifference to the audience it might attract, is the performance. Both Lady Gaga and Phoenix clearly put a lot of work into their characterizations and interactions. The different performance modes they use, for example when singing, are reserved and fallible in their own “real lives”, full, professional integration into their shared dreams. While Gaga holds his own for the duration of the picture, Phoenix’s virtuosity eventually morphs into narcissistic exhibitionism (his supposed Joker “dance” actually just looks like he’s doing stretches before yoga). But it’s still virtuosity, for what it’s worth.