Who needs Joker? Birds of Prey puts Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn centre stage
Who needs Batman, the Joker, or indeed the other members of the Birds of Prey, when you have Harley Quinn? That seems to be the position taken by Cathy Yan, director of Margot Robbie’s sophomore turn as Gotham City’s lovable queen of crime. The debut trailer for Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) focuses in hard on Robbie, with barely a glimpse of the other members of the DC ensemble: Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Huntress, Jurnee Smollett-Bell’s Black Canary and Ella Jay Basco’s Cassandra Cain.
Batman and the Joker are missing, perhaps because Warner Bros has pretty much given up an integrated DC Extended Universe to focus, instead, on releasing quality individual efforts free from a wider web of saga-building. The last Batman encountered by Quinn, Ben Affleck, has been retired in favour of a new caped crusader for the forthcoming The Batman, to be played by Robert Pattinson. And it’s hard to argue that this isn’t for the best given the dark knight chose to punch out Robbie before snogging her back to life in 2016’s ill-fated Suicide Squad.
Meanwhile, the Australian actor’s most recent screen partner as Mr J, the much underused Jared Leto, appears highly unlikely to return to in the role. It’s not yet clear if Joaquin Phoenix’s version of the clown prince of Gotham City will be back for further DC adventures after his fantabulous debut in Todd Phillips’s Joker, so it probably makes sense to omit the supervillain while Warner works out where to go next. The only mention of Quinn’s squeeze in the new trailer is a dismissive one: our (anti) heroine has split up with her partner in crime, and it appears it was not an easy break-up given that she is aiming darts at a mock-up of his features.
And so we have a movie that places Robbie front and centre, just as Suicide Squad tried to do, despite that movie also ostensibly being an ensemble effort.
Time will tell whether this is a wise venture. Warner Bros knows the Robbie-Quinn combo is a thing of twisted splendour – that this spiky, tragic Gotham dame is its DC diamond in the rough. Dismissed by the critics and ruined by over-zealous studio interference in its edit, Suicide Squad nonetheless zoomed to a more than decent $746.8m (£600m) at the global box office, presumably largely the result of those zippy trailers with Robbie taking centre stage.
Will she repeat the trick in Birds of Prey? Or will the other characters move to the fore in the final movie? Will Quinn be a Raymond Chandleresque narrator throughout? Or will Yan opt for a cheeky switcheroo in the final cut? Warner has a habit of making unreliable trailers, so it’s hard to tell.
Suicide Squad preferred wacky visuals over characterisation, and while Robbie had more screen time than her bad-guy counterparts we never really got under her skin. So it’s unsurprising that Birds of Prey seems poised to give us the Harley Quinn movie fans have longed to see ever since her promo for Suicide Squad. Yet there has to be more to Birds of Prey, or why wouldn’t Warner just title this one after its leading figure?
Much will come down to Ewan McGregor’s Black Mask: not the most infamous of Batman supervillains in print, nor the most widely known. But cinema can shake up comic book hierarchies with deft casting and charismatic performances. Still, McGregor will have to grab Quinn’s trademark baseball bat and knock this one out of the park if he is to convince audiences that the Joker and his fellow Gotham miscreants are best left lurking in the shadows.