Crazy supervillain Margot has a blast
Birds Of Prey: And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn (15) Verdict: Enjoyable hokum ★★★★☆
A MOVIE has to go some way to justify an ostentatious title such as this — and the good news is that this one does. It’s a blast.
I confess to sitting down with apprehension. The DC stable of superhero movies, created to give Marvel a run for their very large pots of money, has sent out too many misfires, one of which was 2016’s Suicide Squad.
Still, that film did introduce us to Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, the loose-cannon girlfriend of Jared Leto’s Joker, which was a sizeable tick in its favour.
Here, having just been dumped by the Joker, she’s an even looser cannon. No sobbing under the bedclothes for her. No, in her anger and grief she drives a petrol tanker into a Gotham City chemicals factory.
If she can’t shack up with a supervillain, why not just be one?
After that, director Cathy Yan, and writer Christina Hodson, don’t constrain themselves too much with a coherent narrative. The film is as anarchic as Harley herself, with some nonsense about a priceless diamond eventually bringing together an unlikely sisterhood — the birds of prey of the title: Harley, a tenacious cop (Rosie Perez), a pickpocket (Ella Jay Basco), a nightclub singer ( Jurnee Smollett- Bell), and a killer with a crossbow ( Mary Elizabeth Winstead).
This is a movie in which women repeatedly get the better of men, but it’s agenda-driven only in the way that the petrol tanker is driven — purely to achieve wild, explosive results.
Of course, for the girls to prevail fully, there has to be one man who treats them with particular unpleasantness.
This is underworld boss Roman Sionis (a weirdly cast Ewan McGregor), who in the film’s most uncomfortable scene humiliates a woman in his nightclub for laughing too loudly.
It’s a sequence that might have been described as misogynistic in the hands of a male director. At the very least, it borders on bad taste. But then so does much of the movie.
It’s extremely watchable, though, with great action sequences and a lively sense of fun.
This makes it a solid follow-up to last year’s enjoyable Shazam! for the DC Extended Universe, which is getting its act together at last.