Here again Phoenix does his go-to awkward,loner-stoner schtick. But this time he surely must get the nod from the Academy for the sheer effort of heavy makeup, scrawnyer than usual body and the gargantuan artistic achievement of forcibly sucking in his stomack in all but every scene.
In fact, Phoenix's stomach is a concave testament to character-building at it purest, as the vacuum at the center of his body is the vacuousness of this entire airheaded one-noted whine of a movie.
Every plot(?)-point is so derivative and contrived as to inevitably turning into a game of spot the reference. Here is mostly steals from Taxi Driver and King of Comedy but also bits from Fight Club amongst others. But with none of their flair in writing and direction, and their note-perfect timely commentary dumbed down here to blunt confusion; a doddering senile «these are the times we live in,now..».
The films protagonist is chased through the movie by the most inept pair of detectives outside a cartoon and the Toker himself is portrayed as so feeble-minded as to be utterly improbable as the eventual master criminal, The Joker.
So what is this mess, really?
Yet again, one more in the endless parade of hateful Hollywood-fantasies of violent,nihilistic murder and mayhem towards anyone who dares to disagree with the losing left.
The protagonist is a catalyst for societal rampage by masked hordes of clowns rioting, burning and pillaging in the streets. They are of course stand-ins for Antifa and Occupy Wall Street.
Wayne, the caricatured politician, calling his possible constituents loser-clowns, is of course a stand-in for Trump. So the writers get to shoot him, too.
Petty? You bet! Who was it again that during election made an ongoing talking point of the peaceful transition of power?