 Welcome to Cars Side Reviews, I'm Adam. Last night I saw the Joker with the buddy. We recorded after the film was done. Didn't turn out, it was really late. The footage sucked, so I had to re-record today. You didn't need to know any of that information. Let's talk about the movie. Here's what you do need to know. Going into this, I was fresh. I saw maybe a 30 second trailer, clip, something online, a TV spot. And after that I thought, I don't need to see any more. I didn't even know who was in the film outside of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker himself. So my expectations, my excitement, it was just very flat line. It's just very stale. I wanted to be impressed. I wanted to be possibly blown away by this. And when I left, my first impression was they should have called the movie Arthur and not Joker because 95% of this film is focused on Arthur becoming the character. In fact, I think the biggest comparison I could give it is one that maybe 5% of the people watching would get, which is Better Call Saul. They're on the fourth or fifth season now and he's still Jimmy. He hasn't even fully turned into his Saul Goodman character yet, hours and hours and hours later, we still haven't really seen Better Call Saul. And that's what I felt like when I was watching this two hour film thinking, okay, I get it. He's down on his luck, sad clown Joker. He's being beaten. He's got a bad backstory. He's hurting internally. He's got some major mental issues. He's suffering from some clinical disabilities. There's obviously been a lot of interpretations on the character over the years from Mark Hamill's brilliant voice acting as the animated character and he does the video games and then the TV show and all sorts of stuff to Heath Ledger's darker, grittier take, more serious role. And then you have like Jack Nicholson and that 60s version of the character I can't remember the actor's name. Let's talk about some of the pros. I don't want to give any story elements away. This is spoiler-free, like all my car sides are unless I put up a giant spoiler warning. The cinematography in this is gorgeous. There is a lot of breathing going on with this. The movie takes its time to unfold the story. These shots will hold for sometimes 20 to 30 seconds and you'll just kind of watch as he meanders down the streets or hops downstairs, usually dancing, which is odd. There's an artistic style to this thing too which I think is sometimes a bit played out. Since the Joker is constantly down on his luck and being beaten and being taken down, it's just weird that he rises above it with this kind of dance number that he does. We're talking six or seven times when he's just kind of dancing in his underwear, dancing down an alleyway, dancing before going on stage. And it's not even like a fun, cool dance to watch. It's just him kind of awkwardly positioned in his body in weird ways. The awkward dancing is accompanied by a terrific score. The thing is beautiful. It's this little haunting. It's very epic in nature. Oftentimes when he's just kind of sitting there struggling internally, we don't really see what's going on other than a man who's clearly broken and he's fighting himself constantly. Clearly inspiration was taken from The Dark Knight with Heath Ledger and they thought, you know what, what if Ledger had his own movie? What if that was the sole focus and there was a few other characters coming in and out from the Batman universe, but not really much. They're just background. What if we did that? And that's what Joker attempts to be. I just, and here's the problem for me. I just didn't like this story that much. I didn't like this version of Joker very much. I wanted something more. It's okay to give us a backstory and to give us the troubled way that he's brought up, but I wanted him to turn into the Mark Hamill Joker, the Joker from old, you know, with the purple suit and he's wild, he's a bit goofy, silly, he's got like wind-up teeth and nutsy stuff. This takes the Heath Ledger out, but goes even more extreme with it. It makes him even more of a human, more of a serious threat in a mental way, not in a physical way. That being said, I was still far more intrigued by Heath Ledger's Joker because of the mask on every portion of his life, not just on his face, on his history. We don't know how he got the scars. We don't know how he was brought up. This version removes all the facade. We know exactly why Arthur's the way he is, why he keeps a journal of disturbing thoughts mixed in with some terrible jokes, why he wears the makeup, why he's searching for something more to his life, and that's where the review's kind of tough for me. If this movie wasn't called Joker, if it was called Arthur, it had nothing to do with the Batman universe. This is a really good movie. It's a good character study, but because it says Joker, because there's an expectation with that character, it just didn't live up to it for me, and I was just waiting the whole film for something more. And I know that's not gonna be a problem for a lot. I'm sure it's getting a lot of praise. Phoenix does a great job. He's vulnerable. He's got a physicality. He lost a ton of weight clearly for the role. You can tell he put in the work to make this character stand out. And he does stand out, just not in the way I wanted it. And that's okay, it's not gonna be for everyone. You may be a parent wondering, Adam, give me some advice. Can I take my child to this film? I wouldn't, I wouldn't. I would make sure they're in their teens for multiple reasons. One, it is a slow film. There's, it's a character study, so there's a lot of just dialogue. There's a lot of kind of artsy musical shots that don't really have much going on. And I don't think kids will really appreciate that too much. There's not a lot of action. There's, but when there is action, it is kind of, it's graphic. There's some violence. There's a lot of blood. There's one or two scenes in particular that make you think, okay, this is like American Psycho. This is very, this is very in your face. They don't last long and they weren't like, I don't know, if you've seen Daredevil, the TV show on Netflix, it's nothing really worse than that. You know, like that door scene with the head or a, what's that other one, the boys? Yeah, it's about like that. So, which is a great show. The other hangup I had with the story outside of this doesn't even seem like the Joker is they do a couple of these, you know, twists and turns, I guess, that they reveal later on. And I thought the reveals were incredibly obvious. I was just waiting for them to say, aha, look it, look what we did. They didn't surprise me in the slightest. They may surprise some, I just, that didn't do anything for me. So, in fact, it actually just hindered the story's progress more than helped it. And I found it kind of unnecessary at some points. I don't really have anything else to add. If you're pumped for this, you're probably gonna like it a lot. It's definitely checking a lot of boxes for people. Me not really having any sort of hype or expectation, just it didn't really do much. I just thought, okay, this was fine, but that's not the Joker I wanted to see. So, you know, I say a movie's worth the drive. You should head out to the theater, go to it, or it's a complete wreck, meaning don't see it at all. This I think falls in the middle. I'd say, you know, stay at home, stream it when it comes out on Amazon or Netflix or all the other freaking apps that are out there. Just wait, if you're not in a rush. I don't think there's anything too compelling that's gonna move the needle if you weren't really wanting a Joker movie or cared about a Joker movie. I saw a couple articles about it getting a lot of heat for being controversial and whatnot. I didn't see that at all. I think that some of that is maybe artificial or, you know, sites trying to just drum up controversy for the sake of it. Obviously, you can see a lot of ties to real world events if you look for them. They're pretty in your face, actually. So, you could say like, oh, this represents this group of people, this group of people. You're gonna see what you want to see. That's what a good movie does. You know, it gives you something to talk about. It adds some layer to the story. And this does that a little bit. It's pretty on the nose to me, though, so I'll leave it at that. Thanks for watching. Thanks for joining me in the car and I'll see you next time.