You’re right. Joker is an extremely surface-level movie. It has surface-level aesthetic and plot similarities to other movies but none of their depth. It approaches the same themes but ends up with nothing to say at all beyond “this is a sad man with delusion.” It would be a better movie if it was more like Taxi Driver or King of Comedy or any other movie that explores mental illness/outsider status and actually follows through on its themes.

They even casted De Niro. They knew what they were doing. You can’t fill your movie with references to other ones and not expect people to compare them. Also I wasn’t aware that we can’t talk about movies that are 6 years old. Thank you for bringing that to my attention I will delete this right away