Joker Folie à Deux actor Tim Dillon, who has a small role as an Arkham Asylum guard in the Todd Phillips-directed sequel, has trashed the movie as “the worst film ever made” in an appearance on The Joe Rogan podcast.
“I think what happened, after the first Joker, there was a lot of talk like, ‘Ooh, this was loved by incels. This was loved by the wrong kinds of people. This sent the wrong kind of message. Male rage! Nihilism!’ All these think pieces. And then I think ‘What if we went the other way?’ And now they have Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga tap dancing to a point where it’s insane.”
The song-and-dance heavy film, which Warner Bros. declined to market as a musical but is submitting Phoenix and Gaga in the musical or comedy film categories at the upcoming Golden Globes, was a commercial and critical bust when it was released last month.
The movie grossed just under $38 million domestically opening weekend before falling 81 percent in its second weekend. Its total worldwide gross is nearly $205 million but more than $145 million has come from overseas.
Joker: Folie à Deux has a 32 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and received a D CinemaScore from audiences.
Continuing about the sequel, Dillon said castmembers had a feeling they were working on a bad movie while they were making it.
“It has no plot. We would sit there, me and these other guys were all dressed in these security outfits because we’re working at the Arkham Asylum, and I would turn to one of them, and we’d hear this crap, and I’d go, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And they’d go, ‘This is going to bomb, man.’ I go, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever…’ We were talking about it at lunch, and we’d go, ‘What is the plot? Is there a plot? I don’t know, I think he falls in love with her in the prison?’ … It’s not even hate watchable. That’s how terrible it is,” he told Rogan.
Last month, Quentin Tarantino praised Joker: Folie à Deux during an appearance on The Bret Easton Ellis podcast.
“I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking. But I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is,” the director said. “And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie. That’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were.”
