Joker: Folie à Deux has been a major bomb at the box office, earning scathing reviews from fans and critics alike. But it has at least one big fan in director Quentin Tarantino, who praised the unfortunate sequel at length on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast , calling it the " Natural Born Killers I would have dreamed of seeing." “I really, really liked it, really.
A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking,” Tarantino said. “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. He continued, "And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it.
I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were.
I find myself listening to the lyrics of ‘For Once in My Life’ in a way I never have before.” Tarantino, who apparently wasn't a fan of the original outside of its final scene, saw Joker 2 in an "almost empty IMAX theater," which enabled him to "laugh without bothering anybody." While Tarantino has directed some of the best movies of all time, he's also noted for his affection for grindhouse cinema and films that critics might otherwise reject.
Joker 2 seems to fit.