Birds of Prey

Lively but slight outing for Harley Quinn Dir: Cathy Yan 1hr 49mins (15)

Now here’s a first: a Hollywood comicbook film written and directed by women, featuring a female cast and with no male sidekicks or love interests. Long overdue, you may think, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture, and bound to inspire a generation of girls. Perhaps so, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good. Margot Robbie plays Harley Quinn, a “cutesy psychopath” who has split from her boyfriend, the Joker, and so finds herself adrift in Gotham without the protection of a supervillain. So she promises another Gotham crime lord (Ewan McGregor) that she’ll recover a priceless diamond stolen from him. There are no decent twists or punchlines and precious little plot. “But because it has lots of swearing, violence, snazzy disco outfits and girlpower slogans, the viewer is supposed to cheer and high-five, all the same.”

The fight scenes do have a certain “snap and surprise”, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. But the repartee is “less than sparkling” and any critique of male entitlement dissolves into “jokey irreverence”.

Birds of Prey plays at provocation “while carefully declining to provoke anything like a thought”. The action limps along until the climax arrives “with an embarrassed sigh”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. One of the characters unleashes “the mother of all sonic screams”, a metaphor perhaps for all women denied a voice in Hollywood. “They will be heard. Because they have the right, just like all the men who have gone before them, to make vulgar, turgid crap. And they have.”