Justice League: How The Snyder Cut Redeems Jared Leto’s Joker

Zack Snyder’s Justice League has finally arrived to mostly positive reviews, but does this new addition to the DCEU redeem Jared Leto’s controversial take on the character of the Joker? Since the casting of Jared Leto as the Joker was announced way back in late 2014, fans of the DC Extended Universe have been split over the actor’s interpretation of the character.

Batman’s best-known nemesis, the Joker has been portrayed over the years by a range of actors from Jack Nicholson to Heath Ledger, to Joaquin Phoenix’s sympathetic antihero take on the role in 2019’s critically acclaimed Joker. Each actor has offered a unique spin on Joker, but Leto’s strange, unpredictable take on the part divided fans from the first time his new look was unveiled, and the decision to truncate his role in 2016’s Suicide Squad didn’t help matters.

In his cut-down Suicide Squad appearance, Leto’s Joker is undeniably unhinged and there are glimpses of what the actor was aiming to bring to the character. However, the movie’s short appearance was not well-received and few fans felt Leto made the character his own, though opinion was split on whether this was the fault of the actor’s decisions in the part or his lack of Suicide Squad screen-time. Now the recent arrival of Zack Snyder’s long-awaited cut of Justice League offers fans another chance to see more of Leto’s Joker in action and decide whether his take on the role works.

The Snyder Cut’s Leto Joker Cameo Explained

Leto’s Joker doesn’t have a lot of bearing on the primary plot of Snyder’s Justice League cut, with most of the movie’s action centering around the battle with Steppenwolf and Darkseid. However, the movie’s epilogue, which features newly shot footage, reinstates Snyder’s Knightmare sequence wherein Batman is forced to team up with his former nemesis to save the world from an evil Superman and Darkseid.

It’s a brief, strange scene that sees the pair of famous foes come to an uneasy truce, with both almost attacking the other at various points during the meeting. Appropriately enough for a nightmare, the scene between Joker and Batman traffics in dream logic with both characters referencing unseen events as if the audience were already privy to their occurrence.

The Trailer’s Missing Moments Help Snyder’s Joker

A recent trailer for Zack Snyder’s Justice League featured Leto’s Joker beginning a line with the phrase “We live in a society,” a nod to a meme infamous among fans of the Joker. According to Snyder himself, the line was ad-libbed by Leto during filming, and it’s hard to see how it could have fit in the post-apocalyptic milieu of the Knightmare future (wherein there is little remaining society left to speak of). Some fans were disappointed to see this line missing from the finished film, while others were sad to see that the Christ-like outfit that Leto’s Joker donned in promotional photos also wasn’t actually a part of the Snyder Cut.

However, both of these exclusions prove that Zack Snyder’s Justice League is more invested in the unique dynamic between Leto’s Joker and Affleck’s Batman than shallow fan service or self consciously “cool” imagery. Cutting the Christ imagery and the most meme-able moment from their exchange ensures that, unlike Suicide Squad, the Snyder Cut’s version of the Joker focuses on the character’s impact on Batman’s tortured psyche rather than offering fodder for .gifs. Even Joker’s outfit, complete with a bulletproof vest, is the most practical and least outre attire that fans have ever seen Leto’s Joker don. Along with cutting the more over-the-top moments mentioned above, this aids the Snyder Cut’s attempts to make Leto’s Joker a more rounded and realistic addition to the movie’s (still heightened) reality.

The Snyder Cut Adds Robin and Harley Quinn Backstory

It’s barely touched on and fans could easily miss the clues hidden in Batman and the Joker’s cryptic conversation, but the confirmation that Harley Quinn and Robin are both dead in this future deepens the bond between Affleck’s tortured Bruce Wayne and his dark mirror, Leto’s Joker. In Suicide Squad, the Joker’s status as a sort of Miami mob boss was viewed by many fans as a betrayal of the character’s feckless roots and uncaring attitude toward everything from social prowess to financial gain. Thus, confirming that this Joker lost his love alongside his sanity, as well as hinting at his cold-blooded murder of the Boy Wonder, makes the darkness of Leto’s Joker more grounded and believable.

Where Suicide Squad’s briefly-glimpsed Joker was a zany cartoon character, this dark, creepy take on the character is exaggerated enough to fit into the over-the-top world of Snyder’s DCEU, but his backstory is grim enough (both in terms of the cruelties meted on him and the atrocities he’s committed) to make the character less comical and more threatening.

The Snyder Cut Deepens Batman and Joker’s Connection

Much of what has made earlier cinematic portrayals of the Joker so effective, from the goofy comic character featured in Burton’s Batman to the more realistic and grounded character played by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, is his closeness with Batman. The two characters are interlinked and even Phoenix’s redemptive portrayal of Joker as an antihero featured him meeting with a young Bruce Wayne and highlighting the disparity between their circumstances. Suicide Squad, by barely featuring Batman, left Leto’s Joker unmoored and without his fictional foil even in his limited screen time. In contrast, the briefer role allotted to Leto’s Joker in Snyder’s Cut of Justice League takes the form of a classic tete-a-tete between the duo, and the epilogue makes it clear that whether they are reluctant bedfellows in this fight or eternal enemies in the next, the Joker and Batman’s fates are forever intertwined.

Giving Leto’s Joker the opportunity to play off his heroic counterpart deepens the connection between the characters and even makes Affleck’s stern, stoic Batman depiction more effective. Affleck’s conflicted take on the role can stray into melodrama at times, particularly when the actor shares the screen with Henry Cavill’s similarly glowering Superman, but when contrasted with Leto’s serpentine Joker, the straight-faced take on Batman has an appropriate loose, unhinged nemesis and Affleck’s emotional beats land better as a result.

The Snyder Cut Redeems Leto’s Joker

Leto’s iteration of Joker lacks the wild-eyes mania of Ledger’s iconic take on the role, but the actor is playing the character in a less realistic and more fantastical fictional universe. His over-the-top theatrics lacked impact in Suicide Squad, whose bizarre light-but-violent tone meant the film struggled to make its villain authentically threatening.

However, much like the redesigned Steppenwolf features a stranger and scarier new look, Leto’s Joker is given free rein to be unhinged while also being given a brutally bleak backstory to ground him in the Snyder Cut of Justice League’s brief cameo. Leto’s performance is as odd as ever, but with this added backstory to make sense of his creepy theatrics, the Snyder Cut of Justice League becomes the first film to effectively harness his take on the iconic villain.