Film reviews: 'Salem's Lot | Joker: Folie à Deux | Transformers One

Joker: Folie à Deux (15) ★★★★

Transformers One (PG) ★★

Finally let out of its crypt after finishing production in 2021, the new adaptation of Stephen King’s 1975 vampire novel ’Salem’s Lot is an odd beast. Written and directed by Gary Dauberman — who co-wrote the mega-successful It adaptation — it condenses King’s story in some reasonably effective ways, but for its first half plays more like a creaky TV movie, which is ironic given there have been two of those already, one memorable (the 1979 miniseries directed by Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper), the other (featuring Rob Lowe in the lead) less so.

It’s also now a period piece, taking place at the same time the book was written, seemingly for no other reason than Dauberman has come up with a cool ending set in a drive-in that wouldn’t have worked had he made it contemporary. Otherwise this new version is fairly faithful to the novel’s premise: formerly local author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) returns to his titular home town to research his latest novel and discovers a debonaire bloodsucker and his creepy human minion have targeted the dying area with the intention of creating a vampire colony in the United States.

But where King’s book was steeped in a world in which the percolating realities of Watergate, Vietnam, high inflation and the rise of drug and alcohol addiction were taking a silent toll on the townsfolk of the ’Lot, the movie version not only excises any mention of such things, in its efforts to wrangle King’s unwieldy plot into a two hour running time, it gets rid of most of the backstories too, flattening the protagonists into stock characters that only Alfre Woodard — cast here as the town’s sceptical doctor — manages to transcend.

Which isn’t to say Dauberman hasn’t come up with plenty of visually arresting moments; the aforementioned drive-in finale might even convince you it’s a better movie that it is. Yet the film never captures the seductive appeal of vampires, especially in tough times, and though it works fine as a perfunctory adaptation, think how much more interesting this could have been had Dauberman transposed ’Salem’s Lot to the era of its own making: a pandemic ravaged American small town with the pernicious background presence of Trump’s down-but-not-out supporters hungry to disrupt the country. File under “missed opportunity”.

It’s an intriguing move to make a sequel to a billion-dollar-grossing hit that doesn’t just challenge the audience, but interrogates its more fervent fandom. That, however, is what co-writer/director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix have done with Joker: Folie à Deux, an audacious musical riff on their psychologically grounded reworking of the titular Batman villain’s origins story.

If the first film took inspiration from Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy to explore the troubled mindset of Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), the mentally ill aspiring stand-up Phillips conceived as the Joker’s beaten-down alter ego, the new one uses Scorsese’s New York, New York as a creative touchstone for blending the heightened sensibility of an old-school MGM musical with the grit of a down-and-dirty character study.

Taking it down a musical path is certainly an inspired choice. Arthur’s a fantasist with a dangerously loose grip on reality and what’s a musical but a form of storytelling in which the characters frequently break with reality to express their inner lives in song and dance? When Arthur — back in Arkham Asylum for killing six people in the first film — breaks into a big band-inspired rendition of Stevie Wonder’s For Once in My Life, it’s an oddly appropriate way to express his complicated feelings about both the notoriety he’s garnered as he awaits trial for murder and the romantic connection he’s just made with a fellow inmate named Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel (Lady Gaga), a delusional pyromaniac who’s also a self-confessed super-fan of Arthur’s Joker persona.

Whether or not Arthur’s got some form of dissociative identity disorder is at the heart of his defence but rather than keep Joker at bay, Lee wants Arthur to stop suppressing him. The ensuing film operates according to these divergent personas: we get the ironic razzle dazzle of Arthur and Lee’s Fred-and-Ginger-meets-Natural-Born-Killers love story juxtaposed with a more realistic exploration of the way everyone is trying to exploit Arthur, not least a disgruntled public intent on making Joker their anarchist saviour, ready and willing to burn Gotham City to the ground.

Here Phillips uses Arthur’s trial to slyly deconstruct the hysteria the first film generated, dangling the carrot of another violent explosion, but never delivering it in quite the way we expect. As Arthur literally and figuratively tries to run from his fate, there’s no real catharsis, just a downbeat ending that may resonate in uncomfortable ways with those fans who want a Joker movie to kick off in more conventional fashion.

An animated prequel to the bafflingly successful Transformers movies, Transformers One borrows heavily from the X-Men franchise to concoct an origins story that locates the rivalry between the Autobots (the good guys) and the Decepticons (the villains) in a soured friendship between two lowly robot serfs who discover their “transformer cogs” have been removed to make them more compliant worker bees.

Chris Hemsworth voices future Optimus Prime “Orion Pax”, Brian Tyree Henry is his best friend D16, and the film explores how the latter’s thirst for vengeance will eventually turn him into the evil Megatron. What it doesn’t do is solve the problem of who the Transformers movies are actually for: nostalgic Gen-Xers or actual children.

’Salem’s Lot and Transformers One are in cinemas from 11 October; Joker: Folie à Deux is out now.