Category
The flip side of the movie is part courtroom drama, part character study, but the focus and tension from the original are missing here. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, Joker: Folie a Deux is a poor sequel that fails to capture the greatness of the original and does a lackluster job of blazing its own path.
There were so many opportunities for Coppola to flesh out the world of the film and make New Rome a character unto itself. Details on what the rest of the country is like, how New Rome came to exist, what people actually do in the city, or even why Cesar Catalina is so famous are all left in the dark.
The resurrection of dead franchises and the creation of new ones based on recognizable intellectual properties all target one core emotion: nostalgia. Hollywood is not facing a lack of ideas; rather, it's facing a nostalgia epidemic.
This new Caligula, re-edited by Thomas Negovan using 96 hours of recently discovered footage, remains a bizarre mix of pretension, melodrama, historic liberties and pornography, punctuated by memorable (yet mostly poor) performances.
While the script isn’t as sharp as in the first movie, Beetlejuice himself is still charming and creepy. Whoever designed the props and underworld characters did a great job of making them look in line with the first movie, while also not making them too grotesque.
In a moment of bone-chilling honesty, Chris Jones admits thinking, “I can’t believe I was shooting farmers in Afghanistan while these fu**ers are still breathing back home.” For Jones, January 6 was not a wakeup call -- rather, it served as a confirmation of a successful coup d’état of American armed services indoctrinated into a far-right ideology akin to fascism.
When Costner gambles, he rarely loses. Maybe it is divine intervention; maybe it is a long run of dumb, prolonged luck, but reality proves that Costner’s “My Way or the Highway” approach to Hollywood stardom resonates with audiences. Whether it's his love of sports, his gift for playing stubbornly, or his wry smile that signals to audiences he may be rough around the edges, but he is a good guy.
What really holds the movie up is that the writing is the sharpest of all three Deadpool movies and it does a great job of poking fun at Disney’s recent fumbles with Marvel movies. It also acts as a sendoff for many of the Fox-produced Marvel movie characters, and I’d be lying if I said all those cameos weren’t fun to watch.