Joker has everything Suicide Squad WANTED to be: a villain centric-film that gets into the nitty-gritty of baddy psychology and never pulls its punches in its approach to exploring mental-illness, present-day dystopian America (even though this film's set in 1981 you still feel the relevance in relation to Trump's America in 2019) and showing that baddies don't fight for saving the world, but for themselves. This film is an anti-thesis to a MARVEL Studios film: Joker doesn't have a team of superheroes trying to save the world for the better, but rather one single man that represents the disillusioned masses of metropolitan citizens launching a revolution against the city's 'elite' socialites who don't understand the underprivileged people they're supposed to support.
Joker is 2019's most nihilistic Hollywood offering and it's a far-cry from the feel-good nature of Avengers: Endgame, where the superheroes fight for a cause that has a clear-cut end in sight that can be achieved; Joker takes place in a grey world where every character is a moralistic blur and the place they live in may or may not outright define their underlying character. This is a villain-film through and through and it doesn't try and pretend The Joker is a heroic figure who will save Gotham from itself: if anything, he's a by-product of Gotham's social-rot and he's part of a bigger and crazier problem that is the city's feeling of collective negligence and hostility towards privileged people.
If you want a happy-go-lucky blockbuster that tells a tale of optimism and hope for loners suffering with mental illness, be warned that this movie isn't the right one for you. It's comic book filmmaking that has no superhero to root for: just the villain.
Joker is 2019's most nihilistic Hollywood offering and it's a far-cry from the feel-good nature of Avengers: Endgame, where the superheroes fight for a cause that has a clear-cut end in sight that can be achieved; Joker takes place in a grey world where every character is a moralistic blur and the place they live in may or may not outright define their underlying character. This is a villain-film through and through and it doesn't try and pretend The Joker is a heroic figure who will save Gotham from itself: if anything, he's a by-product of Gotham's social-rot and he's part of a bigger and crazier problem that is the city's feeling of collective negligence and hostility towards privileged people.
If you want a happy-go-lucky blockbuster that tells a tale of optimism and hope for loners suffering with mental illness, be warned that this movie isn't the right one for you. It's comic book filmmaking that has no superhero to root for: just the villain.