By Gary D. Rhodes.
It is so very easy to hobgoblinize a film, even if one needs a thesaurus to ferret out an abundance of negative adjectives. And yet, I am struck by the sheer number of blatant errors and falsehoods about FáD that mainstream critics have relied upon.”
Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) proved wildly successful, far more so than anyone could have imagined. Phillips’ sequel, Joker Folie á Deux (2024), became far less successful than anyone could have predicted. Here is recent, infamous film history.
It is simple to understand Folie á Deux’s (hereafter FáD’s) failure with comic book fandom. Its predecessor created a compelling new origin story for one of the greatest supervillains of all time. The sequel found Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) unable to live up to the weight of a persona that he partially created and that he partially inherited from the circumstances of his horrible life. Fleck renounced Joker; fandom renounced Fleck, and, by extension, the entire film.
Wondrous it would be to know whether fandom would have rejected the movie even if Fleck had fully embraced the Joker. The film’s lack of mayhem and murder would still have been underwhelming to many. And its status as a musical – a musical relying on old American standards, no less – might alone have caused major disappointment.
Even before FáD’s release, fandom had witnessed bad superhero musicals, whether the disastrous Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2011) or the intentionally silly extravaganza depicted in Hawkeye (2021). The two genres don’t mix, at least for most fans.

During the internet age, fandom has become far more powerful than ever before. Long gone are the days of photocopied fanzines with limited readership. From Ain’t It Cool News to Emergency Awesome, the critics of fandom have wielded great power. And many of them have much to admire, specifically enthusiasm, passion, and indepth knowledge of certain areas of pop culture and film history, of subjects like horror and superheroes that mainstream critics have long decried.
The downside is the sickening attacks that some fans – and I strongly emphasize only some – have launched against the likes of Quentin Tarantino, who has famously praised FáD. Fan critics who are smart at their subjects deserve respect, very definitely, as long as they don’t conduct themselves hatefully and threateningly in the global public square.
When it comes to FáD, perhaps the most surprising result of the audience response is that it holds – as of this writing – a 32% score on Rotten Tomatoes. If fandom alone were responsible for ticket-buying and streaming, I believe that number would be lower, significantly so. The roughly one-third of audiences who accepted or liked or even loved FáD probably range from those who aren’t part of fandom to those who aren’t particularly devout disciples of it.
What’s more striking than the 32% score on Rotten Tomatoes is a nearly identical 31% score, the tally of the responses from popular-audience critics, those working for the likes of newspapers, magazines, and professional websites. This numerical similarity provokes important questions, including the extent to which approximately 70% of these film critics – or a smaller percentage, to be fair – exemplify a pack mentality.
Prior to addressing those questions, it is worth examining a range of specific critics and what they have written about FáD. It is so very easy to hobgoblinize a film, even if one needs a thesaurus to ferret out an abundance of negative adjectives. And yet, I am struck by the sheer number of blatant errors and falsehoods about FáD that mainstream critics have relied upon. I fear that my brief survey reveals a bleak view of the state of modern film criticism.
Small Errors
Some of the errors I have identified in JáD criticism might well be tiny. Or perhaps not, given that they appear in reviews of limited word count, thus assuming a staus beyond what they probably deserve.
For example, numerous critics have noted the fact that Lady Gaga does not actually play Harley Quinn, because her character’s first name is “Lee.” To me, this is a small matter, but it has raised much ire. The complaint is also patently false, so much so as to deserve a patent, or at least a trademark. At approximately 48:07, the reporter Paddy Meyers (Steve Coogan) clearly and definitely refers to Gaga’s character as “Harley.” More notably, the film features a fantasy Joker television show, both names illuminated in lights.
And then there is the following statement in Slate’s review: “When the asylum shows the MGM classic The Band Wagon [1953] on movie night, Lee gets so bored she sets fire to the rec-room piano.” But Lee makes clear she wants to be with Fleck, kissing him in the screening room even before the duo flee together. She sets the fire to spend private time with him, not because she’s fatigued by bands, wagons, or both.

And then there are critics whose word choice is completely wrong. The London Times dubbed Gaga’s singing as “atonal.” That critic has the right to say her singing is exquisite or awful… but the term “atonal” has specific meaning in music, and the term was applied inaccurately in England’s newspaper of record, one with such a prestigious and storied history.
Or witness The Village Voice: “Phoenix is nevertheless out-acted by his own alarmingly protrusive scapulas.” Phoenix’s body and its movements belong to him. They are part of his acting, so too the rather extreme weight loss he undertook to portray the role. Efforts to be clever result in defective commentary, hardly necessary if a critic simply wishes to lambast Phoenix’s acting.
Rolling Stone tells us that books and TV movies have been written about Fleck during his time in Arkham Asylum. False. JáD refers to only one TV movie. And the only book discussed during the entire running time is about the final last days of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro).
Similarly, we could cite PopMatters, which contends that Fleck killed five people and that Lee says she watched the TV movie about him a hundred times. No. Fleck killed six people, the sixth (his mother) receiving particular attention in two different scenes. And Lee only claims to have seen the TV movie twenty times, a number that she later recants. Small errors, yes. Wrong, incorrect, and in print, under the bylines of people criticizing other people? Yes. And they rightly allow us – I would go so far as to say require us – to ask how closely these critics have watched the film that they are publicly condemning.
In no other area of professional journalism would blatant, factual errors be tolerated with such regularity….”
Major Errors
My questions about some of JáD’s critics necessarily become more crucial given the magnitude of certain mistakes they made.
Consider this assertion, published in The Guardian: “Phoenix’s own performance is as single-note as before….” One could rhapsodize or eulogize Phoenix’s performance, but to say it’s as “single-note as before” is quantitatively a nonsense. Here is a film in which he cries, he laughs, he falls in love, he sings, he tap dances. To say “single-note” is mathematically challenged.
This “math” plagues several critics. According to IGN, “[Phillips] centers the movie entirely around its own predecessor, without doing or saying anything new.” JáD opens with an animated cartoon. It becomes a musical in which Fleck falls in love with Harley and renounces his status as the Joker. These are examples of Phillips clearly doing something new, so much so that they caused widespread audience disappointment.

And then there is this statement in Looper: “You could do anything with Joker in a wacky fantasy musical number, and instead [Phillips] chooses to give us absolutely nothing.” Obviously this writing is inexact, because “nothing” would mean no musical numbers at all. But more to the point that this critic struggles to make, we could despise every musical number, while still being able to count the different types of approaches that Phillips uses, from Fleck singing For Once in My Life inside his own head at the grimy asylum to Fleck and Lee sharing a lavish, Hollywood song-and-dance atop a Gotham skyscraper.
Safety in numbers might provide comfort for the ill-informed. The Irish Times noted, JáD is “a musical, a prison movie and, mostly, a plodding courtroom drama.” Plodding is an opinion, and more power to anyone’s opinion. “Mostly” is a vague effort towards quantification, but it denotatively it means the majority share, the greatest part. The Irish Times is quantifiably false. The courtroom scenes in JáD do not begin until approximately 54 minutes into the film’s running time. The courtroom scenes end before the final 23 minutes of the film, which is 138 minutes in duration. And during the 61 minutes when the trial is underway, nearly twenty minutes of that running time is devoted to other scenes, such as Fleck at prison. At most, thirty percent of the film takes place at the courthouse.
Probably the most ridiculous mathematics appeared in The London Standard, whose critic declares, “No emotion or thought can be expressed other than through the medium of song.” But so many scenes feature joy and loss and pain without singing, including the vicious rape of Arthur Fleck. Even if one does not find these scenes compelling or good, they make The London Standard’s comment false. The same review also complains that, “Harley breaks into That’s Entertainment for the gazillionth time.” I do not perceive “gazillionth” to be a legitimate number, but the more important issue is that Harley only sings the song That’s Entertainment twice in JáD. Only twice, and neither time all the way through. Twice. The gulf between the numbers two and a gazillion would be astronomical. So too, it seems, this critic’s relationship between notetaking and guesswork, between fact and fiction.
Disillusions
What does my study suggest? To learn that poor writing exists in many modern film reviews hardly constitutes news. I continue to struggle with this statement in The Daily Tar Heel: “Folie à Deux is a complete dumpster fire in almost every direction.” I suppose some dumpster fires aren’t complete, the flames licking below the dumpster’s top. Might dumpster fires move in every or almost every direction? Would that be hell on wheels? Or would that be the four directions of the dumpster’s sides? Maybe six if we could the dumpster’s bottom and top? Would the top be open air, and, if so, presumably hot?
My survey suggests that many film critics – though certainly not all, I hasten to ad – make factual errors in numbers beyond what magazine and newspaper editors should ever deem acceptable. IGN had to retract its wrong statement that the song Going to Build a Mountain was written specifically for JáD. By contrast, as of this writing, the London Standard still attributes Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered to Barbra Streisand, the song dating to Pal Joey, which opened on Broadway in 1940, its 1957 movie poster clearly on view during JáD’s animated opening. (Streisand wasn’t even born until 1942.)

But I fear and truly believe something more strange, more noxious might be play, something that is not dissimilar to the critical backlash given to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) or, for that matter, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). I am not at all comparing those two movies to each other or with JáD. Rather, I am talking about similar behaviors amongst groups of popular-audience critics. For example, most critics raced to disparage Fire Walk with Me after it’s premiere at Cannes. The same was true after JáD’s premiere at Venice.
A segment of JáD’s critics seemed as eager to attack Phillips as some had been to attack Lynch, who had gained acclaim for such films as Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild Heart (1990), success that landed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1990. Lynch has had too much success, so let’s knock him off the pedestal upon which we earlier placed him. While hard to quantify or prove, that interpretation seems to be the case, one made starker by Fire Walk with Me’s modern critical and audience standing.
At times it seems as if some film critics suffer from a sadistic form of groupthink, one in which they are eager to savage a director who has received in their eyes too much praise. Feed the auteur to the machine, as coordinated and choregraphed as the workers at the machine-turned-temple in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). I cannot help but draw attention to the sheer number of critics who described JáD as a “middle finger” to its audience and/or to fandom. That same metaphor, those exact same words, over and over again. Perhaps it is coincidence. Or perhaps some of the repetition stems from some critics reading each other.
In other cases, the hate seems as singular as it is palpable. The New Yorker strives mightily to sound intelligent while contorting JáD and Joker’s anti-rich vigilantism into a defined, political screed: “The movie’s spirit of antiplutocratic revolt is inspired by right-wing vigilante injustice; it’s a fascistic fantasy dressed up in egalitarian righteousness.” The New Yorker’s rant strains credulity if one reads the same critic’s review of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012), a film in which vigilantism is on display far more flagrantly than in either Phillips’ movies. Consistency matter not, especially if beclouded in language best suited for a postgraduate student trying to sound smart.
Such are the vagaries of popular-audience film reviews, a dubious game that for at least some critics is without rules or fact-checking. (And lest there be any doubt, I could chronicle far more examples of problems and errors in JáD reviews than I have.)
When we reflect on the critical reaction to Citizen Kane in 1941, we know that the desire to knock Welles had more than one impetus, from the zeal to ambush the enfant terrible to the urge to please William Randolph Hearst.
At least some critics wished to attack Phillip on the heels of his much-awarded Joker, which generated over $1 billion at the box-office. Here is my speculation, which I believe it has merit.
But I must go back to Rotten Tomatoes, the 32% audience score and the 31% critical score. Is this near-equivalence a coincidence? Or is some of the critical response not only the result of pack mentality, but also an effort to appease fandom, to avoid the avalanche of complaints and backlash that Quentin Tarantino bravely endured?

To be clear, I definitely believe that some popular-audience critics who condemned JáD genuinely published their sincere views, as did so many in fandom. Wonderful. Likewise, I admire the small number of popular-audience critics who praised JáD, going against the crowd-turned-mob. I salute their bravery.
But I fear that far too many popular-audience critics do not possess the understanding of film history and terminology that they should to review films professionally. I fear that too many are haphazard in their viewing, their critiques riddled with errors. And I fear that too many are easily swayed by prevailing audience winds.
We live in an age that witnesses the decline – some would say collapse – of mainstream, legacy media. In many respects, I regret these changes, though at times it is difficult to perceive the difference between evolution and devolution.
We need film critics. Some have been wise. And some are, present tense, without question. But many are not. I’m really not sure how most modern film reviews help us in any way, shape, or form.
It pains me to end with a quotation from Rolling Stone, the groundbreaking magazine that once featured insightful reviews.
Rolling Stone concludes its review of JáD with a “deux-deux” joke. Whatever one thinks of the film, we don’t need scatalogical humor that should only appeal to nine-year-olds. Here is devolution. Here is commentary that makes me regret reading the review and the magazine. It doesn’t matter whether or not I like JáD. I cannot find any value in such vulgar, amateurish garbage. It belongs in the aforementioned dumpster fire.
Not surprisingly, folie á deux metaphors have spread in the wake of Phillips’ film. For myself, I am concerned about the shared madness of too many modern film critics, whose arrogance and pretentiousness is matched only by their proclivity towards factual errors and groupthink. In no other area of professional journalism would blatant, factual errors be tolerated with such regularity, certainly not in hard news, or even sports, where statistics and numbers are so very important.
The legacy of legacy media deserves better. So do readers. So do filmmakers and film audiences. Far better, perhaps even a gazillion times better.
Gary D. Rhodes, Ph.D., filmmaker, poet and Full Professor of Media Production at Oklahoma Baptist University, is the author of Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies, and Mysterious Monsters from 1970s Documentaries (Boswell Books, forthcoming), Vampires in Silent Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Becoming Dracula – Vols. 1 and 2 (with William M. [Bill] Kaffenberger, BearManor Media), Consuming Images: Film Art and the American Television Commercial (co-authored with Robert Singer, Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (IAP, 2012), The Perils of Moviegoing in America (Bloomsbury, 2012) and The Birth of the American Horror Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), as well as the editor of such anthologies as Becoming Nosferatu: Stories Inspired by Silent German Horror (BearManor Media, forthcoming), Film by Design: The Art of the Movie Poster (University of Mississippi Press, 2024), The Films of Wallace Fox (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), The Films of Joseph H. Lewis (Wayne State University Press, 2012) and The Films of Budd Boetticher (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Rhodes is also the writer-director of such documentary films as Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004).
Read a review of Gary Rhodes’s new book, Vampires in Silent Cinema (Edinburgh University Press), here and an excerpt from the book here.