I'm writing this post because it's getting very low ratings. From the reviews that I read, many people say it doesn't meet their expectations of what a superhero movie should be.
I'm not a capeshit enjoyer. I chose to see Joker 2 because Joker 1 had vague themes of "defunding welfare programs is bad". In the first movie, Joker loses access to his mental illness medication because the politicians defund the welfare programs and that leads Joker to start doing crimes.
What I liked about Joker 2 is that everyone around him wants to make him miserable, but instead he chooses to be happy. In my opinion, it is the most pure example of absurdity. The whole world wants to make Joker miserable and he is powerless to change other people, but he can deny giving the world what they want so he chooses to laugh. I find that to be entertaining.
The movie was about 60% musical. Whenever Joker starts to hallucinate, everyone starts singing. I think it was okay, but other people did not like that. You probably won't like the movie if you are expecting it to follow the superhero movie formula.
I havwnt seen it in 14 years so Im fuzzy on the detaila but when I watched it it seemed very pro surveillance state in a war on terror way to me.
You're misremembering.
The movie showed scenes of the possibility to exploit mass dragnet surveillance "for security" by targeting cell phones.
It was especially remarkable because it shows this in 2008, 5 years before we learned (from the Snowden revelations) that the NSA was doing this "for security".
But the film didn't champion it, it made it clear that doing it was unethical, and it condemned it. It painted Batman as a villan because he chose to harm innocent civilians in his increasingly maddening obsession to get revenge against the Joker.
The movie wasn't subtle about this. When we learned how batman hacked into the phones of everyone at Gotham, Morgan Freedman's charscter said "this is wrong" and then he resigned.
Edit: the clip of this dialog is on YT https://youtube.com/watch?v=0Yb7Ps2gA0w