Comedian Tim Dillon, who makes a fleeting appearance in Joker: Folie à Deuce, has called Todd Philips’s DC sequel the “worst film ever made.”
The follow-up to the Oscar-winning 2019 film, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck (Joker) and Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel (Harley Quinn), was branded “stupid” by critics upon its October 4 release and flopped at the box office.
Dillon, 39, who played a guard at Arkham Asylum in the movie, recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast where he spoke about his time filming.
“It’s the worst film ever made,” Dillon said. “I think what happened, after the first Joker, there was a lot of talk like, ‘Oh, this was loved by incels. This was loved by the wrong kinds of people. This sent the wrong kind of message. Male rage! Nihilism!’ All these think pieces. And then I think, ‘What if we went the other way,’ and now they have Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga tap dancing to a point where it’s insane.”
“It has no plot,” he continued. “We would sit there, me and these other guys were all dressed in these security outfits because we’re working at the Arkham Asylum, and I would turn to one of them and we’d hear this crap and I’d go, ‘What the f*** is this?’ And they’d go, ‘This is going to bomb, man.’ I go, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.’
“We were talking about it at lunch, and we’d go, ‘What is the plot? Is there a plot? I don’t know, I think he falls in love with her in the prison?’ It’s not even hate-watchable. That’s how terrible it is.”
Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader was among those who agreed with Dillon’s assessment. He said in an interview that he walked out after around 10 or 15 minutes, bought something, came back for another 10 minutes, and decided: “That was enough.”
The film has had its defenders, however, including Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino.
Speaking on American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast, Tarantino said: “I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the film-making but I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is. And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or that’s like a big, giant mess to some degree.
“And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it.”
Tarantino went on to say that Phoenix gave “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life,” and argued that Phillips had embraced the spirit of the movie in his work. “The Joker directed the movie,” said Tarantino. “The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money – he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right? … He’s saying f*** you to all of them. He’s saying f*** you to the movie audience. He’s saying f*** you to Hollywood.”
Hideo Kojima, the creator of the iconic video game series Metal Gear Solid and more recently Death Stranding, recently argued on X/Twitter that the second Joker film might take years for the film to be fully understood.
“It may take some time for it to become a true ‘folie à deux.’ But there is no doubt that everyone in the audience loved Joaquin and Gaga in this film,” he wrote.
