Barely halfway through “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the Joker’s star-crossed lover Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga) asks her beau: “Isn’t this more fun than a movie?” Quinzel may be right to distinguish “Folie à Deux,” which consists primarily of Joaquin Phoenix smoking cigarettes in aesthetic lighting and rasping jazz standards, from what is generally considered “a movie.” To suggest that these quirks somehow elevate it, however, is a delusion worthy of Quinzel’s deranged personality.

Before wading any deeper into the muck of director Todd Phillips’ latest effort, it’s worth saying a word about the original Joker movie, which first introduced audiences to Phoenix’s take on the iconic villain. “Joker” may have suffered from lackluster pacing and a reliance on plot arcs lifted practically verbatim from Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy,” but it nonetheless seemed relatively assured in its message. 

Arthur Fleck, otherwise known as the Joker, was mentally ill, a victim of the system, whose lifelong history of abuse culminates in a violent outburst. Basically, it made sense. The same cannot be said for “Folie à Deux.”

“Folie à Deux” begins roughly where the previous movie left off: with Fleck locked up in Arkham Asylum, awaiting trial for his murder spree. The movie’s central conflict is between Quinzel and Fleck’s lawyer, Maryanne Stewart, played by actress Catherine Keener. Quinzel is in love with the Joker and consequently urges Fleck to embrace his alter ego, along with the accompanying psychotic behavior.

Stewart, on the other hand, is trying to convince a jury that Fleck suffers from split-personality disorder as a consequence of his traumatic upbringing and that it was his alter-ego, the Joker, who committed those awful crimes. If you’re a little confused about where exactly Quinzel and Stewart differ, rest assured — so am I! They both seem to want the Joker to really exist, unlike the prosecution, which is determined to prove that the Joker is merely an elaborate performance by Fleck, who is disturbed, but perfectly sane.

And if you think that “Folie à Deux” has any intention of actually answering the question it poses about Arthur’s sanity, think again! The story itself, where the psychotic Joker is (almost) nowhere to be found, seems to point to sanity, while the constant string of musical numbers suggests the opposite. Which brings me to the greatest enigma of all: what was Phillips thinking with the music?

If you’re already going to the trouble of paying Gaga to sing in your movie, why not capitalize on her talent? Phillips insists on the driest possible choreography and most pared-back vocal delivery for every single musical number, completely ruining a series of songs that are typically quite beautiful. The music is meant to represent Arthur’s fantasy world, but the all too familiar classic Hollywood stagings fail to conjure any meaningful sense of fantasy.

Perhaps the single redeeming quality of “Folie à Deux” is Phoenix, who somehow manages to maintain his artistic dignity through a humiliating series of musical performances and actually bring the thinly written Arthur Fleck to life. Yet this small win is not nearly enough to rescue “Folie à Deux” from its many, many missteps. In short: what do you get when you cross a boring and jumbled story with a series of trashy musical numbers? Well, as Fleck so aptly put it in the original “Joker,” “You get what you f–king deserve!” 

That is, a total flop.

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