Review: 'Hitpig' is a sorry excuse for children's entertainment, an animated movie with no humor or soul

The makers of the animated kids’ movie “Hitpig” list experience working for Illumination Animation, the folks behind the “Despicable Me” franchise — and if this is what they make on their own, one might predict that the next “Minions” movie will be much better without their involvement.

The title character of this terrible slog of a movie, Hitpig (voiced by Jason Sudeikis), is a wise-cracking  animal bounty hunter, working for the reward of returning recalcitrant animals to their owners. In the early scenes, we see Hitpig take down a radioactive polecat (voiced by RuPaul) and a surly koala (voiced by Hannah Gadsby) — and run into his nemesis, an animal-rights protester, Leticia dos Anjos (voiced by Anitta), who works to set free the animals Hitpig captures.

When Leticia hacks into Hitpig’s bank account, he needs a big score. He finds one when a nasty Vegas animal trainer, Leapin’ Lord (voiced by Rainn Wilson), needs someone to retrieve his prized pet elephant, Pickles (voiced by Lilly Singh). 

Hitpig finds Pickles, who’s naive enough to think that the pig is trying to rescue her and take her home to India. Hitpig goes along with the lie, but soon finds himself wanting to help Pickles out rather than bring her back to Lord. It’s like “Midnight Run,” only with anthropomorphic animals and no jokes.

Directors David Feiss and Cinzia Angelini, who have long IMDb pages of their credits as animators and storyboard artists, create animated set pieces that go flat on the screen, even when the backgrounds and animation get bouncy and colorful. The script, by Illumination alums Dave Rosenbaum and Tyler Werrin, is thin on plot and heavy on incidental one-liners — enough of them not synced up to any character’s mouth to make one suspect someone was brought in to punch things up, which they fail to do.

I should mention that “Hitpig” is based on a story by Berkeley Breathed, the author who created the ‘80s comic strip “Bloom County.” Breathed also wrote the book that was the basis for “Mars Needs Moms,” an animated movie so bad it ended director Robert Zemeckis’ fascination with motion-capture computer animation. The fallout for “Hitpig” won’t be so severe, because no one is going to notice when it fails. 

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‘Hitpig!’

★

Opens Friday, November 1, in select theaters. Rated PG for action/peril, rude humor and some thematic elements. Running time: 84 minutes.

Review: 'Your Monster' mixes rom-com charm with horror thrills, not always smoothly, but Melissa Barrera works both genres wonderfully

The ingredients of writer-director Caroline Lindy’s debut feature “Your Monster” — big city rom-com, Broadway musical, breakup drama and bloody horror movie — don’t always blend smoothly, but there’s more going right here than not.

Laura Franco, played by the lovely and lyrical Melissa Barrera, is a mess right now. Her cad of a boyfriend, Jacob (Edmund Donovan), recently dumped her because he couldn’t handle the emotional strain of her cancer treatments. When they were together, Jacob was writing a musical, and relying on Laura as his muse — and promising her that when the show went to Broadway, she’d play the lead, which is based on her. Now, though, Jacob has started auditions on the musical without her. 

Laura is reduced to crying in her mom’s New York apartment, while Mom’s off traveling. Her best friend, Mazie (Kayla Foster), is too flighty to hang around a lot, so the only human connection Laura’s had is the Amazon driver dropping off more shipments of tissues. 

But Laura isn’t so alone after all. One night, chasing down a mouse in her closet, she discovers there’s something else living in there. It’s a monster — specifically, the monster that lived under her bed when Laura was a child. The monster (played by Tommy Dewey) is scary at first, but then he’s just rude. The monster has grown accustomed to living alone in the apartment, and gives Laura two weeks to pack up and leave.

However, since Lindy is employing the time-honored tropes of romantic comedy, that’s not what happens. Laura and Monster start to tolerate and even like each other, as Monster helps Laura find the strength to bluff her way into the audition for Jacob’s musical and get hired as understudy to star Jackie Denton (Meghann Fahy). One night, at the cast’s Halloween party — the one time Monster can venture out of the apartment without terrifying the masses — they even get to dance.

Barrera is familiar with the various genres being mashed together here. She’s been in such horror movies as “Abigail” and “Scream VI,” danced in Benjamin Millepied’s variation on “Carmen,” and sang with Anthony Ramos in “In the Heights.” Barrera is the total package, and Lindy’s knowing take on modern romance and musical theater helps her highlight her talents for belting out a song and enduring buckets of blood.

Dewey — who popped up on my radar playing legendary “Saturday Night Live” writer Michael O’Donoghue in “Saturday Night” — is quite charming as the Monster. He tackles a Shakespeare soliloquy, trades sarcastic barbs with Laura, and shows he can be funny and fiercely protective of his roommate-turned-paramour. (Dewey delivers the movie’s single funniest line, when the Monster offers to help Laura deal with Jacob: “I could threaten to eat him, if it would help. I mean, I could eat him. It would take literally two seconds.”)

Even with lines like that, and the early suggestions of the Monster’s menace, it’s not enough to set us up for a pretty bloody and completely deserved ending. Thankfully, Barrera and Dewey have already won us over with their screwball charm, until the audience is ready to follow “Your Monster” wherever it may go.

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‘Your Monster’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 25, at the Cinemark Century Salt Lake (South Salt Lake), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex at The District (South Jordan). Rated R for language, some sexual content and brief bloody violence. Running time: 102 minutes. 

Review: 'Rumours' is a deadpan and sometimes surreal satire of global diplomacy, as world leaders wander in the woods when a real crisis is upon them

The humor in “Rumours” is so dry that one should not approach it with an open flame, lest it burst into flames — which is actually something that happens in this oddball satire of modern diplomacy.

In a castle somewhere in Germany, a summit of tthe G7 is getting started. The leaders of the world’s leading democracies — the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, Canada, the United States and the host country, Germany — are tasked with drafting a joint statement that will speak decisively, but not too controversially, to all nations about the ongoing crisis the world is facing.

It won’t escape the audience’s notice that none of these world leaders ever talk about what the crisis is. Instead, these world leaders more preoccupied about the process they should follow in drafting their joint communique — and the content-free verbiage they will put into their statement. The most interesting thing that happens on the castle grounds is an archaeological dig, where the experts have unearthed an ancient corpse of something called a “bog body,” from an era when leaders were sacrificed because they didn’t keep bad weather from destroying the crops.

As the summit’s first working dinner gets underway, in a gazebo without any aides, we start to see the personalities of the seven world leaders:

• The German chancellor, Hilda Orimann (Cate Blanchett), is laboring to be a welcoming host. 

• The UK prime minister, Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), is all business, her laptop at the ready. 

• The American president, Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), tells war stories and falls asleep a lot (and, for no adequately explored reason, has an English accent).

• The Italian prime minister, Antonio Lamorle (Rolando Ravello), is attending his first G7, and is happy to let others speak. 

• The Japanese prime minister, Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira), says little, and appears smarter than the rest for that reason alone. 

• The French president, Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), is happy to do all the talking. 

• And the Canadian prime minster, Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), is a charming rogue, and we’re led to believe had a one-night stand with the British P.M. at the last summit.

As the sun goes down, the seven leaders notice that they can’t reach their aides on their cellphones, and that everything around the gazebo has gone eerily quiet. At one point, Maxime leaves the group, and when Sylvain tries to find him, he runs back terrified. “I believe we’re in a crisis,” Sylvain gasps — a real one, not a geopolitical one — and these world leaders are at a loss what to do next.

The movie is directed by the Canadian surrealist Guy Maddin (“The Saddest Music in the World,” “Brand Upon the Brain!”) and his collaborators for the last decade, the brother team of Evan and Galen Johnson. What they depict, by way of Evan Johnson’s loopy script, is a group of world leaders forced by their unexpected circumstances to, as they used to say on MTV’s “The Real World,” stop being polite and start being real.

Since being real isn’t something these politicians do well, the attempts set them wandering into complete weirdness. At one point, as the leaders wander through the woods, they encounter two discoveries: A brain the size of a VW Beetle, and a representative from the EU, Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander), who has come under the brain’s influence — and has reverted to making apocalyptic pronouncements in Swedish.

As the evening devolves into strangeness, viewers get to enjoy a deadpan ensemble of actors playing world leaders accustomed to acting like they’re in charge. The standouts among the group are Blanche,tt’s unflappable German, Amuka-Bird’s tightly wound Brit, and Dance’s blustering American — and, yes their personality quirks seem to be meant to mirror the stereotypical traits of the countries they represent, with varying degrees of success.

Can I pretend I understood what was happening in “Rumours” from start to finish. No, I cannot — especially with that ending. I can recognize that Maddin and the Johnsons are saying something profound and biting about the hollow contradictions of world leaders, people willing to sacrifice anything for global unity — anything, that is, except for their next election back home.

——

‘Rumours’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some sexual content/partial nudity and violent content. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Exhibiting Forgiveness' is a difficult, but rewarding, story about breaking the cycle of toxic fatherhood

A tough watch but an ultimately beautiful one, “Exhibiting Forgiveness” is an emotional story of the ugly cycle of abusive fatherhood and the difficult work of breaking it.

Writer-director Titus Kaphar’s film is deeply informed by his own experiences, though calling it semi-autobiographical seems inadequate. The main character, Tarrell (André Holland), is a painter, like Kaphar (in fact, Kaphar painted Tarrell’s canvases). Tarrell is quickly becoming an acclaimed young Black artist, and his agent, Janine (Jamie Ray Newman), wants him to mount another gallery show, hot on the heels of his last one. But Tarrell has a deal with his musician wife, Aisha (Andra Day), that he’ll stay home and take care of their son while Aisha records her next album.

Tarrell is also working to help his mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), move out of the house where she raised him — a move Joyce is reluctant to follow through on. Further complicating Tarrell’s life is the sudden return of his father, Laron (John Earl Jelks), a recovering crack addict who treated Tarrell badly as an adolescent, as he applied what he learned from his own father.

It would be easy for Kaphar to lapse into the storytelling clichés of addiction and abuse, and there are moments, particularly in the flashbacks, where the movie comes perilously close to falling into those traps. The cast — Holland, Day, Jelks and particularly Ellis-Taylor — keep the emotions real and raw, and the layers of art, between Tarrell’s paintings that evoke the old neighborhood and Aisha’s music (Day wrote or co-wrote many of the songs here), provide a depth usually not achieved in this type of story.

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‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language and brief drug material. Running time: 117 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 20, 2024, when the movie premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Smile 2,' with Naomi Scott's dynamic turn as a tormented pop idol, puts the staging of gore ahead of a plotline that's ploddingly predictable

In 2022’s “Smile” and now in the sequel, “Smile 2,” director Parker Finn shows he has the smarts to deliver chilling scenes of horror tension and the stomach to stage some effectively disgusting bits of gore.

Now if Finn could overcome the plot excesses and leaps of illogic of the franchise’s scripts — which he wrote. 

The sequel picks up six days after the first “Smile” ended, with that movie’s lone survivor, New Jersey police detective Joel (Kyle Gallner). As the first movie established, there’s an evil spirit of some kind that feasts parasitically on a person, and when that person has given up everything the spirit wants, that evil makes the host kill themselves in the messiest way possible and in front of a witness — who then becomes the next host, going mad until they kill themselves in front of someone else and keeping the streak alive.

Joel figured out the daisy chain of horrific death, but not before becoming infected himself. His plan, in the sequel’s opening sequence, involves trying to pass the evil parasite on to a skeevy drug kingpin, who presumably will off himself and infect other criminal scum. This doesn’t exactly go as planned, and the next victim turns out to be a minor drug dealer, Lewis (Lukas Gage). 

Finn then cuts to a different character: Skye Riley (played by Naomi Scott), a pop star who’s preparing for her next world tour — after being away from performing for the last year, going through rehab for alcohol and cocaine addictions, and healing from the car crash that also killed her movie-star boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson). 

While going through the stress of rehearsals for her first concert, and accepting the tough-love care of her mother/manager (Rosemarie DeWitt). Skye is still dealing with back pain from her accident. She aims to score some Vicodin from a drug dealer she knows — her high school acquaintance, Lewis.

When Skye goes to see Lewis, he’s ridiculously paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and screaming. Then the screaming stops and Lewis suddenly has a maniacal, Joker-like smile on his face. Then he bashes his own head in with a barbell weight. And, just like that, Skye becomes the next person to be trapped in the curse.

Skye starts seeing people displaying maniacal grins everywhere, and is sure that she’s going nuts. Not even the intercession of her mom, her assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), her record label’s boss (Raúl Castillo) or her estranged best friend, Gemma (Dylan Gelula) seem to cut through the terror Skye is experiencing.

The reason nothing penetrates in “Smile 2” is that, in all the jump scares of Finn’s script, everything is happening in her head. The familiar plot device is handy because it allows the audience to see the most terrifying things Finn can imagine and bring to the screen, and that part of his imagine is fertile indeed. The best set piece involves demonic versions of Skye’s dance crew converging on her, like a disturbing game of “Red Light, Green Light.” 

The problem is that watching the movie devolves into a simple guessing game — is this part real or in her head? — that often becomes predictable, which is the worst thing a horror thriller can be. That said, the conclusion is bat-crap crazy, in a good way.

The main thing that breaks up the script’s plodding expectations are Skye’s rehearsal scenes, which allow Finn to sneak some musical numbers into the mix. (What is happening with thrillers and horror movies this year, like “Joker: Folie À Deux,” secretly being musicals?) If Skye Riley ever opened on tour for Lady Raven, the pop icon at the center of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap,” I would try to buy tickets until the vendor’s website crashed.

Scott — who played Jasmine in the live-action “Aladdin,” and was strong in Elizabeth Banks’ unfairly maligned “Charlie’s Angels” reboot — is compelling here, giving the tormented Skye a ferocious determination not to be sucked down by these evil forces. If she could apply that spark to breaking free of Finn’s tedious storyline, “Smile 2” could have been a horror thriller worth smiling about.

——

‘Smile 2’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, grisly images, language throughout and drug use. Running time: 127 minutes.

Review: 'Saturday Night' captures — but keeps from falling into — the madness of putting together a TV classic's iconic first show

As someone who would sneak downstairs to watch “Saturday Night Live” with his older brothers, there was a large part of me that desperately wanted to love “Saturday Night,” director Jason Reitman’s frenetic and fond re-creation of the 90 minutes before the first episode of the venerable sketch-comedy show hit the air.

As someone who’s older and more realistic about the half-century of myth-making that has been made of both the original cast and the show’s creator and producer, Lorne Michaels, I was wary of falling in love with this airbrushed history.

In the end, though, Reitman’s story of scrappy underdogs sticking it to the corporate behemoth of NBC hit more often than it missed — which is, if we’re being honest, a better batting average than “Saturday Night Live,” then or now, has ever achieved.

It’s 10 p.m. in New York, on Oct. 11, 1975, and Michaels — played by Gabriel LaBelle — is nervously waiting for a cab outside NBC’s studios at Rockefeller Center. In that cab is one of the acts he’s booked for the first episode of “SNL,” an awkward comedian named Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun). 

Coming back into the show’s studios on the 8th floor, there’s chaos all around. Crew members are darting this way and that, cast members are bumping into each other, the writers are exchanging pages, and Michaels is looking at a bulletin board with cards. Each of those cards represents one sketch or performance he wants to put on the show — and, if they all got in, the 90-minute show would run three hours.

Michaels has to bounce around the studios, putting out fires — sometimes literally — at every turn. His top writer, Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), is bristling at the red-pencil changes being ordered by the woman from the network’s standards department (Catherine Curtin). The crusty director, Dave Wilson (Robert Wuhl), has no idea what’s supposed to happen or when. And one of his actors, John Belushi (Matt Wood), still hasn’t signed a contract.

Michaels is being constantly reminded — by his boss, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), and the network’s head of talent, Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe) — that NBC can easily pull the plug on this new show and run a Johnny Carson rerun. And the network’s old guard, embodied by a phone call from Carson and a set visit from “Mr. Television” Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), hovers nearby, like ghosts of television past.

The one person is Michaels’ corner is one of the show’s writers, Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), who was also Michaels’ wife at the time. Rosie becomes Michaels’ sounding board, as well as taking on roles as cast wrangler, Belushi whisperer and writers-room champion — and Sennott’s warm, vivacious presence cuts through the clutter of this frequently overstuffed movie. 

The script, by Reitman and Gil Kenan (Reitman’s collaborator on the “Ghostbusters” reboots), neatly gives small moments to each of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players. They show us Belushi as the gonzo artist, Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) as the arrogant leading-man-in-waiting, Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) as a smooth-talking lecher, Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation) as a Juilliard-trained thespian questioning his role in this madness, Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) as a chameleonic pro, Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn) as an anxious comic inventor, and — my favorite in this bunch — Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) as the big sister who sweetly watches over them all.

Reitman and Kenan have apparently collected a ton of stories from “SNL” veterans about the show’s origins, and tries to stuff in every origin story — from rookie comedian Billy Crystal (Nicolas Podany) pitching himself to keep a slot on the show to Michaels hiring writer Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener) in a bar — into one crazy night.

The result is a free-wheeling backstage comedy, dissecting the inner workings of a network TV show as it’s on the verge of falling over the edge. It’s reminiscent of Tina Fey’s “30 Rock” or Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” and it would have helped for Reitman to enlist either of those writers for a light polish over the script. Maybe one of them would have convinced Reitman to tone down the attempts at straight impersonation (though Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, singer Naomi McPherson as Janis Ian and musician Jon Batiste as Billy Preston all have smile-inducing moments).

At the center is LaBelle as Michaels, threading through many rooms, barely keeping his head above water as he labors to keep it all together and give a satisfactory answer to the often-asked question “What is this show?” (It’s the second time LaBelle has played the younger version of an entertainment icon, having been Steven Spielberg’s fictional alter ego in “The Fabelmans.”)

Thanks to the lead performances by LaBelle and Sennott, as well as sharp supporting turns at every corner, “Saturday Night” comes close to what Lorne Michaels imagines his show has been — a one-of-a-kind experience as much as it is a show. 

——

‘Saturday Night’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 11, in theaters. Rated R for language throughout, sexual references, some drug use and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'In the Summers' captures the eras of two siblings' life with their troubled dad, more with looks than with words

The thoughtful and sometimes wrenching drama “In the Summers” takes an episodic look at a difficult childhood, showing two siblings on their summertime visits to their volatile father.

Each of the four chapters starts the same way: The kids, Violeta and Eva, are standing outside the airport in Las Cruces, New Mexico, waiting for their father, Vicente (René Pérez Joglar, known by his rap name, Residente), to pick them up. In the first chapter, Violeta (Dreya Castillo) and Eva (Luciana Elisa Quinonez) are elementary-school age, and enjoying swimming in the pool at Dad’s house, or going out stargazing in the desert. The most dramatic moment in this segment, and a foreshadowing of what’s to come, is Violeta cutting her hair to a more masculine bob.

In the second chapter, Violeta (Kimaya Thais) and Eva (Allison Salinas) are a few years older, and Dad is more troubled. They notice more easily, playing pool at the bar of Vicente’s friend Carmen (Emma Ramos), that Dad drinks too much. One night, on a long drive, Dad’s interest in beer leads to horrific results.

Chapter 3, and Eva arrives without her sister, and finds Dad has a new girlfriend, Yenny (Leslie Grace, from “In the Heights”), and together they have a baby girl, Natalia. In Chapter 4, the siblings are out of college, Violeta (played now by Lio Mehiel, from last year’s Sundance hit “Mutt”) is transitioning and Eva (Sasha Calle, who played Supergirl in “The Flash”) is wary of getting too open with Dad.

Writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio is not particularly interested in the surface details of these characters — for example, it’s never clear what Vicente does for a living, other than once when we see him tutoring a student, Camila (played by Gabriella Surodjawan and Sharlene Cruz at different ages). Instead, Lacorazza is aiming for the emotional truths that lie deep below. This may be confounding for fans who expect an explosive argument where all the grievances are finally aired, but it turns out the subtle approach is more true to who these characters are.

Though Pérez Joglar is the constant force of “In the Summers” and carries Vicente’s pain well, the film’s emotional weight is handled adeptly by the six young actors who play Violeta and Eva at three different ages — particularly Mehiel and Calle, who communicate years of pain and memory with a single look.

——

‘In the Summers’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, Oct. 11, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), and other theaters. Not rated, but probably R for sexuality, some violence, alcohol and marijuana use, and language. Running time: 98 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 24, 2024, when the movie premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Joker: Folie à Deux' is a dull wallow that drags Lady Gaga into Joaquin Phoenix's tedious darkness

There’s a dim coldness to director Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie à Deux” — like a carp flopping in the bottom of the boat — that permeates every moment of this casually cruel and clumsily nihilistic follow-up to the 2019 Gotham-as-cesspool psychological drama that won Joaquin Phoenix his Oscar.

Phillips and writing partner Scott Silver find Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck right where his past crimes left him: Arkham Asylum, taking his court-ordered meds so he can be deemed competent to stand trial for the five killings he committed, most prominently of talk-show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) live on national television. He spends his days anonymous among the other asylum patients, even though his notoriety has the guards (led by an oily Brendan Gleeson) constantly asking him to tell a joke.

One day, after a visit from his overworked defense lawyer (Catherine Keener), Arthur is being led back to the maximum-security ward and sees a woman in the minimum-security area. That woman, Lee Quinzel (played by Lady Gaga), seems to make an instant connection with Arthur — two kindred spirits who see the madness of the world as more dangerous than the madness of each other. (The movie’s title translate to “madness for two.”)

Here, the shared insanity manifests itself through music. Arthur and Lee begin a halting, unsteady duet on a song like “For Once in My Life” or “That’s Entertainment,” in the dank confines of Arkham — and, within a few bars, their voices firm up, and the “reality” of the asylum transforms into a colorful Broadway stage or a TV studio, and the pair are dressed like movie stars. But there’s no rhyme or reason to the song cues, seemingly chosen less for appropriateness to the story than because Gaga likes the oldies.

Lee gets released from the asylum just as Arthur’s trial is starting, which means Lee gets a gallery seat while Gotham City prosecutor Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) launches into an open-and-shut case of five murder counts. Arthur’s defense, such as it is, is to plead that Arthur’s mind was hijacked by the character of Joker, and wasn’t responsible for his actions. That argument takes on added weight when Arthur, as Joker, decides to represent himself — playing to the gallery and the mob more than to the jury.

The trial’s details cling so tightly to the events of the first movie that there’s no room for this suffocating movie to breathe on its own. How dark and depressing is this movie? Let’s put it this way: If “Seven” had musical numbers, it might get to where “Joker: Folie à Deux” has set up shop.

The only positive note for this movie is Gaga, who fully commits to the bit. She imbues Lee, aka Harley Quinn, with the true-believer zealotry of a true convert. And getting to hear Gaga sing, even in this dispiriting context, is a pleasant experience. 

The worst part about a movie being as nihilistic as “Joker: Folie à Deux” is that it’s boring. Right up to the movie’s final image, nothing matters in a world this bleak — and when nothing matters, why bother watching?

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‘Joker: Folie à Deux’

★1/2

Opens Friday, October 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some strong violence, language throughout, some sexuality, and brief full nudity. Running time: 138 minutes.