Zack Snyder’s: Joker
“You won’t kill me, I’m your best friend.”
Zack Snyder included an Epilogue at the end of his Snyder Cut, an amalgamation of story threads he was interested in pursuing should he get the chance.
One of those was the Knightmare storyline, which continues the apocalyptic plot thread first teased in Batman v. Superman. In it, Superman has been consumed by the antilife equation and serves Darkseid as his master. It was heavily marketed that Jared Leto’s Joker would make a return for said sequence. It was a huge opportunity for Leto to redeem his take on the Joker, after fan backlash for his efforts in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. It had been 5 years, during which Joaquin Phoenix had debuted with his own Oscar take on the character, which could only inform Leto how to approach the character.
He had 5 years to conceive of a path towards redemption. I for one thought that in the hands of Snyder, maybe Leto could finally get it right. After all, rarely does anyone get a do-over in a scenario like this. But it amounted to a wasted opportunity. For one, Affleck and Leto didn’t shoot together due to logistics and an ongoing pandemic. Not that it would have made much of a difference since the script was poorly written.
Snyder did a great thing in Batman v. Superman, by teasing the existence of a Boy Wonder who passed away at the hands of the clown prince of crime, alluded to by the ink on his armor. It was a tease that could have amounted to a storyline exploring the Red Hood. But most importantly, it painted the history between Batman and Joker. Seeing them collide should have made us excited for a Batman film starring Affleck opposite Leto.
But seeing them together was underwhelming, there was however a glimmer of brilliance in this debacle. When Joker says he will be the bigger man and offers Bruce a truce using a Wild Joker card. This truce will remain at play until he decides to tare it, in which case he will be happy to discuss why he chose to send the Boy Wonder to do a man’s job. Visually, Snyder delivers with a frame coming into focus. The sound design in this moment also elevates the scene.
Batman responds by calling back to Harley Quinn’s death and promising her that he would kill him, nice and slow. Then he snatches the card out of Joker’s hand. Leto’s reaction to this is brilliant, and a glimmer of hope that perhaps with a well-written script he could knock it out of the park. His Joker works great when he drops the tone of his voice. Although he should really revisit the laugh, he hasn’t quite figured it out yet.
A lot of Leto’s work as the Joker in Suicide Squad ended up in the cutting room floor, it’s sad to see the pattern repeat itself. Snyder himself teased other scenes prior to the release of his film, and its unfortunate that it too ended on the cutting room floor.
I’m intrigued to see if any of them redeem Leto for good…
