Joker Movie Early Reviews Praise Joaquin Phoenix
Reviews are now trickling out for Todd Phillips' Joker and they are almost all overwhelmingly positive.
It looks like Warner Brothers and DC’s boldest comic movie gamble yet may just pay off.
Joker, director Todd Phillips’ take on the iconic DC comic villain starring Joaquin Phoenix, just premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival. Publications and fans have now registered their impressions online…and those impressions are mostly of rapturous praise.
In Joker, Joaquin Phoenix stars as a version of Clown Prince of Crime that is seemingly unrelated to any other incarnation in the Batman canon. His Arthur Fleck is a failed standup comedian in 1981 who is driven insane by the madness of Gotham city around him. While Joker is largely rumored to be a self-contained experience, it’s also the first entrant into “DC Black,” a series of films divorced from the main DC Extended Universe.
According to these early reviews, it sounds like the DC Black series has started off on the right foot.
Jim Vejvoda at IGN gives the movie the rare 10/10.
Joker would work just as well as an engrossing character study without any of its DC Comics trappings; that it just so happens to be a brilliant Batman-universe movie is icing on the Batfan cake. You will likely leave Joker feeling like I did: unsettled and ready to debate the film for years to come.
Mark Hughes of Forbes calls Joker no less than one of the best films of 2019.
Get ready to rethink what’s possible in comic book movies. Again. In a little over a month, Warner Bros. releases the latest DC Comics adaptation Joker;— an origin story of Batman’s arch nemesis — and if you thought The Dark Knight and Logan pushed the boundaries of adult storytelling and Oscar quality for these types of films, Joker is about to up the ante.
Owen Gleiberman of Variety calls Joaquin Phoenix’s performance “astonishing.”
More than that, though, the whole movie, in spirit, is a kind of origin-story riff on Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight: the comic-book villain as Method psycho, a troublemaker so intense in his cuckoo hostility that even as you’re gawking at his violence, you still feel his pain.
Pete Hammond of Deadline is equally effusive in his praise for Phoenix’s Joker portrayal.
Phoenix is all in and then some, a performance so dazzling risky and original you might as well start engraving his name on the Oscar right now. No joke, this is a movie — premiering today at the Venice Film Festival — unlike any other from the DC universe, and you will find it impossible to shake off. At least I did.
David Ehrlich of Indiewire calls Joker the boldest superhero movie since The Dark Knight, but also describes the movie as potentially toxic, given the real world context in which it will arrive.
Todd Phillips’ Joker is unquestionably the boldest reinvention of “superhero” cinema since The Dark Knight; a true original that’s sure to be remembered as one of the most transgressive studio blockbusters of the 21st Century. It’s also a toxic rallying cry for self-pitying incels, and a hyper-familiar origin story so indebted to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy that Martin Scorsese probably deserves an executive producer credit. It’s possessed by the kind of provocative spirit that’s seldom found in any sort of mainstream entertainment, but also directed by a glorified edgelord who lacks the discipline or nuance to responsibly handle such hazardous material, and who reliably takes the coward’s way out of the narrative’s most critical moments.
Stephanie Zacharek at Time has similar concerns.
The movie’s cracks — and it’s practically all cracks — are stuffed with phony philosophy.Joker is dark only in a stupidly adolescent way, but it wants us to think it’s imparting subtle political or cultural wisdom. Just before one of his more violent tirades, Arthur muses, “Everybody just screams at each other. Nobody’s civil anymore.” Who doesn’t feel that way in our terrible modern times? But Arthur’s observation is one of those truisms that’s so true it just slides off the wall, a message that both the left and the right can get behind and use for their own aims. It means nothing.
The Twitter reaction was largely effusive with praise.
Joker premieres on October 4.
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Alec Bojalad is TV Editor at Den of Geek and TCA member. Read more of his stuff here. Follow him at his creatively-named Twitter handle @alecbojalad
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TV Editor at Den of Geek and Television Critics Association member. Based in Cleveland, Ohio. Very upset about various sporting events.