10 Smart Movies Which Are Secretly Dumb

Joker is a thoroughly entertaining film if you don't take it too seriously, and gamely ignore the ridiculous and exhausting discourse that's followed it around ever since its release.

Joker quickly became a film upon which critics and audiences alike projected their own feelings, effectively serving as a reflection of each viewer's experiences and biases.

Some saw it as a commentary on "incel" culture, while others felt it was unnecessarily sympathetic to a violent white man in the midst of a mental health crisis.

It was given insistent descriptors like "complex" and "cerebral" by many commentators, despite the fact that Joker is, at its core, a relatively straight-forward mash-up of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.

It's so brilliantly acted by Joaquin Phoenix, and writer-director Todd Phillips does such a solid job of making his film look like anything but a typical comic book film, that it basically tricked people into thinking it's a much meatier piece of work than it really is.

It's basically a live-action adaptation of the infamous "we live in a society" meme, and a pretty effective one at that, as long as you remember it's a fundamentally ridiculous piece of work - and one pointlessly, stupidly tethered to the Batman mythos no less.