The 3-time Oscar nominee Joaquin Phoenix has joined a distinctly elite squad of actors to address the position. There is, without a doubt, something about the individual’s heady mixture of theatricality, bleak humor, and appropriate old skool psychopathy that draws thespians to being aware.
Jared Leto, ‘Suicide Squad’
Phoenix virtually can’t do much worse than Leto. The Oscar-triumphing “Dallas Buyers Club” co-star’s run on the position become preceded via breathless reviews of his Method-fashion insanity all through production — gifts of dead animals and used condoms, intimidation of group contributors, only speaking in person, and so forth. — so the result was the wrong kind of stunning: Leto is barely gifted inside the very least reduce, with best a handful of mercifully quick scenes wherein the actor cackles desperately, menaces frantically, preens embarrassingly and is usually about as scary as your average trick-or-treater. It’s a frustratingly shallow performance, wherein the actor and his director cognizance on flashy surfaces (his comically on-the-nostril tattoos consist of the words “Damaged” and “HAHAHAHA”) instead of plumbing
. Cesar Romero, ‘Batman’ ‘Batman’
Then again, possibly Leto turned into paying homage now not to the recent Jokers of notice, but the unique onscreen portrayal: the film and tv celebrity Romero, who played the function throughout the 3-season run of the comedian e book’s preliminary television model, as well as its 1966 function movie expansion.
The 1/2-hour collection became a live-movement caricature virtually, with bright colors, running track, and snazzy photos reflecting the Pop Art aesthetics of the technology. Thus, the vast portrayals of Gotham’s supervillains have been suitable to the cloth, and Romero’s interpretation of the joker as a merry prankster is one of the display’s highlights. But he doesn’t make lots of effect to modern eyes — and the collection’ current high-definition upgrade attracts even more interest to his regrettable choice not to shave his mustache for the function.
Zach Galifianakis, ‘The LEGO Batman Movie’
This mutation of Warner Brothers tent poles (the DC Universe and the “LEGO Movie” franchise) is much less a “real” Batman movie than a spoof of the property, with gags purpose to disturb and to terrify, at the same time as the number one purpose right here is laughs. But remarkably, the comic actor can provide no longer only at the man or woman’s humor; however, his pathos — the photograph’s smart screenplay casts the connection between the Dark Knight and his most frequent antagonist as one among mutual reliance and even codependence, with the joker uproariously staging acts of villainy mostly for batman’s attention. Abnormally, this interpretation gets at a vital facet of the character that eludes its darker versions.
Jack Nicholson, ‘Batman’
Nicholson’s payday for his top-billed turn in Tim Burton’s blockbuster — which blanketed no longer simplest a handsome cut of the profits, but a substantial piece of the merchandising bearing his likeness — changed into a record-breaker. And one gets the sense, while watching the final product, that the photo’s producers desired to get their cash’s well worth; Burton appears to apply each 2nd of footage he shot, even when it quantities to little more significant than his expensive actor dancing at the period to Prince songs. (That takes place two times.) It seems a broadly speaking undirected overall performance; however, Nicholson invests the position with the sort of assumed threat and to-the-balcony theatricality that producers sincerely had in mind when they signed his assessments.
Cameron Monaghan, ‘Gotham’ Our minds in the back of the Fox series, which explores the pre-Batman history of Bruce Wayne and Commissioner James Gordon, has taken tremendous pains to insist that the dual brothers Jerome and Jeremiah Valeska (each performed via Monaghan) aren’t the joker — and technically, that’s real. But the show’s presentation of those characters is meant to loudly echo the “Dark Knight”-generation reading of the joker, and Monaghan’s interpretation of them undoubtedly prompted by using Heath Ledger’s paintings. Yet the more youthful actor isn’t only cosplaying; the definition of the beautiful characters, and the breadth of their multi-episode arcs, permit him to explore the nooks and crannies of the joker’s psyche in methods each acquainted and sparkling.
Heath Ledger, ‘The Dark Knight’
Ledger gained a far-deserved posthumous Oscar for his chilling, haunted turn because of the joker, the most unambiguous indication that he becomes as much as a whole lot more than “comedian e-book film” slumming. Under the decisive hand of the director Christopher Nolan, Ledger creates one of the scariest villains in all of the cinema — and one who’s frighteningly real, a sincere-to-goodness sociopath whose nihilistic philosophy (as Michael Caine’s Alfred memorably places it, “some men just need to watch the sector burn”) invests the person, and the film, with a terrifying feeling that each one bet are off, and that proper won’t prevail. Though widely acclaimed on time, Ledger’s performance appears to the dark knight.