So I finally watched it. And was left disappointed.

Joker is a giant performance embedded in a hollow film. It’s trying desperately to be an homage to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, and Joaquin Phoenix is arguably better than DeNiro was in either of those… but when you look past its stylistic pretensions, it’s just a super-villain origin story that goes on for an hour too long.

And even that giant performance works against it, because It sucks all the oxygen from the room. With Taxi Driver, Scorsese made room for DeNiro to redefine film acting for his generation and turn Jodie Foster into a thirteen year old movie star and even give a young Cybil Shepherd a chance to shine… Joker’s secondary characters are as paper-thin as Arthur Fleck‘s understanding of people in general.

Yes, I suppose it’s an interesting inversion, turning TD’s unhinged, kinda-fascist Travis Bickle into an unhinged, kinda-anarchist clown, but that’s as deep as it gets. Unless “boy, we’re really shitty to people with mental illnesses” is what passes for insight these days.

But I’ll say this: between Joker, The Master, I’m Still Here, and Her, Joaquin is unquestionably the most accomplished actor of the twenty-teens. I can’t name anyone who went as balls-out over the course of the decade, and unlike Leo DiCaprio in the 2000s, he didn’t have the tailwind of a 1990s blockbuster pushing his career along. His fucked-up face and his fucked-up teeth and the ghost of his handsome, super-talented brother couldn’t stop him… it’s pretty goddamned amazing.