Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B-

Within five minutes of Joker starting, I thought to myself, Well, I’m jumping off this train. From then on, to the very end, I was not on board. If I weren’t planning to write this review and therefore felt an obligation — I did it for you, dear reader! — to stick it out until the closing credits, I would have walked out. At least I could take some small comfort in fantastic cinematography by Lawrence Sher (Garden State), and a fully committed performance by Joaquin Phoenix, even if it was in service of a script that is almost shockingly, willfully wrong-minded.

I’ll save my “woke” criticism for now, and perhaps appeal to even the “anti-PC” crowd with some comic book legacy logic. The Joker, as presented here by writer and co-director Todd Phillips, is a man who starts with at least moderately good intentions but turns bad in the face of an oppressively uncivilized world conspiring against him. The problem with this approach is that the Joker was never intended as a figure to be pitied. Phillips wants us to empathize with him, to find ourselves saying “That poor guy” in spite of his abhorrent behavior, which is antithetical to the decades-long legacy of the character, who is an unrepentant but darkly comic psychopath. Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker is never genuinely funny; instead, he just inspires a citywide revolt among rich frat bros with nothing else to stand for.

It doesn’t exactly help that this is the fourth high-profile casting of this character in the past thirty years. Jared Leto’s ridiculously excessive antics on the set of Suicide Squad in 2016 are now far better known than the movie itself, and at this point is hardly worthy of anything more than disregard. Prior to that, the role was made iconic twice: first by Jack Nicholson, in my opinion still the best Joker ever portrayed, in Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989; then by Heath Ledger 19 years later in Christopher Nolan’s superhero masterpiece The Dark Knight in 2008, earning him a posthumous Oscar. It’s now 11 years after that, and not only are we bombarded with countless superhero movies every year, including endless sequels and reboots that occur with less and less lag time between them, we’re moving into supervillain origin stories.

Who asked for this movie, anyway? Nothing about Joker will be iconic with any lasting merit; it has no chance when it gets swallowed by the sea of derivative comic book superhero narratives surrounding it. There were complaints about the Ben Affleck Batman movies depicting the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents yet again. Guess what we see in Joker! Presumably Todd Phillips thinks he’s giving it a clever twist, but it’s hard to give a clever twist to the beating of a dead horse. It’s just an animal corpse that is impossible to twist because it’s too huge and heavy.

Joker has many problems, but its second-biggest one is how it willfully and brazenly conflates mental illness with villainy. It’s frankly irresponsible, presenting this idea that the Joker as a persona was created because the man behind the clown makeup is “misunderstood.” He has a “condition,” which causes him to laugh hysterically at inappropriate times. People regard him as a freak and abuse him for it; his lashing out against them is exacerbated by his conscious decision to stop taking his many medications. We eventually learn of what his behaviors can be traced back to, and it is even more clichéd than you might fear.

Someone should tell Todd Phillips that the most compelling villains are sane ones. I never thought of either Jack Nicholson’s or Heath Ledger’s Jokers as insane; these were comically sinister figures who knew exactly what they were doing, and happily took responsibility for it — something Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker really never does. In the original Batman, when Vicki Vale tells the Joker “You’re insane!”, he quips back, “I thought I was a Pisces!” And in The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne has his “aha moment” regarding the Joker when Alfred says to him, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

I thought about that line several times while watching Joker, which rejects the sentiment behind it wholesale. Some may be tempted to say that’s just what this Joker wants by the end of the film, but they would be wrong — this whole plot turns on an alienated and severely socially awkward loner, who is so cliché he lives with his ailing mother, basically setting the world on fire as a means of gaining acceptance.

The Joker was never meant to be such a towering figure of insecurity, of barely contained fragility. He’s supposed to be an unnerving sociopath with no sense of morality and without even a thought about justice, preferably with a wicked sense of humor. Joker fails on all these fronts; instead, we see him in the fetal position getting beaten up by teenagers within the first five minutes. I never once felt bad for this dipshit.

There is one moment near the end, involving Robert De Niro as a late night talk show host, that is played for a shock so effective, I will begrudgingly give this movie some small amount of respect. If only the rest of the movie could have had more such moments. It’s great to look at, at least. The first lines heard at the beginning are the sounds of a man on a radio discussing a worker strike leaving the city clogged with bags of garbage. That turned out to be one hell of an apropos metaphor for Joker, which is a slick pile of garbage.

Overall: C+