On October 4, “Joker: Folie à Deux” premiered in movie theaters across the country, serving as the sequel to “Joker” (2019). It picks up where the first movie left off, with Arthur Fleck, played by actor Joaquin Phoenix, in Arkham Asylum. I can confidently say that “Folie à Deux” was an utter flop, undoing everything that was built in the first film, making it a waste of time and money.

This movie suffers from so many issues that it’s baffling how it got approved for production and released in theaters. The biggest change from the first film was that “Folie à Deux” turned into a musical. I actually like and enjoy musicals more than your average person, but what they did here was a disservice to the genre.

Many of the musical scenes don’t add any depth to the characters or the story. The majority of these scenes are just played out in Arthur’s imagination. If you were to remove them, the plot would remain the same.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, these musical scenes mess up the pacing. They force the plot to come to a dead stop, bloating the runtime unnecessarily. This happens so often that I found myself getting more and more annoyed at how many musical numbers there were.

The plot is a mess. I couldn’t tell you what the movie was about because it felt chaotic and senseless. By the end of the film, Arthur says the Joker doesn’t exist, which, from a narrative standpoint, is utter nonsense. It unravels everything the first movie accomplished. When Arthur said that, I was left in shock—realizing I had just wasted my time.

Many of the musical scenes involve Arthur’s love interest, Lee Quinzel, who is Harley Quinn in the comics, played by singer and actress Lady Gaga. Their romance begins when Arthur catches a glimpse of her on his way to therapy. Lee’s character revolves more around her idolization of the Joker than Arthur himself. She’s willing to do anything for him.

You’d think Arthur’s life would improve once he’s with Lee by the end of the movie, but you’d be so wrong. It doesn’t make sense that at the start of “Folie à Deux”, Arthur is back to being lonely and depressed, just like he was in the first movie, even though he became the Joker by the end of that film. His character arc is even worse in this movie—it’s not an arc at all, just a circle.

Toward the end, Arthur sees Lee one last time, but when he tells her the Joker was never real her idolization crumbles. She says everything they’ve done was just a fantasy. With that, Arthur is left alone and depressed again, with no character growth whatsoever.

After Lee broke Arthur’s heart, I kept thinking, “How could this movie get any worse?” Well, it somehow did. Throughout the film, there’s a background character—an unnamed patient who doesn’t speak or have any real role. But in the final five minutes, this random patient kills Arthur Fleck. That was the final nail in the coffin for me.

The only redeeming aspect of the ending was the irony: the same joke Arthur told Murray before killing him in the first film was told back to him. But even that moment couldn’t save this disaster of a film.

This movie made me realize that punchlines don’t always hit the mark.