BIRDS OF PREY
Girl crazy
Time to judge just how fantabulous this emancipation turned out to be.
RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 15 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/ download Director Cathy Yan Cast Margot Robbie, Ewan McGregor, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell
Once upon a time in Hollywood, actors had an uneasy relationship with comic book characters. Too often these roles would define them, shackle and stunt their careers for all that they conferred fame and fortune. Now, of course, the industry is a battery farm for icons, a salt mine for IP. The right part is a gem for a star’s screen portfolio.
Margot Robbie is too talented, too much in demand to ever fret about the pitfalls of playing somebody made of ink and fan dreams. Clearly she relishes being Harley Quinn, the giddy, glitterdusted psychopath she first played in 2016’s Suicide Squad. Birds Of Prey – not forgetting its breathlessly awkward subtitle And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn – is very much a passion project. Robbie pitched it personally to the studio and spent three years developing it, serving as producer as well as star.
Mixing needle-dropping smartassery with #MeToo sexual politics, the film finds Harley fighting to escape the long, crooked shadow of the Joker, her newly ex-puddin’. No longer protected by dint of being the killer clown’s squeeze, she’s harassed by assorted creepers and sleazebags and targeted by crime lord Roman Sionis aka Black Mask, played as a preening lounge lizard by Ewan McGregor (the character’s trademark skull mask is barely worn, and McGregor chiefly mines him for easy camp caricature laughs).
There’s a MacGuffin – a diamond that carries the secret of a crime family fortune – but it’s barely an excuse to team Harley with the titular Birds, none of whom pay more than lip service to the DC characters that inspired them. Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) only finds her sonic superpower at the film’s close, while Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s crossbow-wielding Huntress spoofs the entire concept of a taciturn vigilante, practising her tough girl lines in the mirror. It’s amusing enough, but diehards may bristle.
Peppered with dialogue that’s just on the edge of Tarantino parody, Birds Of Prey attempts to bluff its way through with a bratty self-awareness. Harley’s the narrator and she stops and starts the story, rewinding chunks of plot – “I’m tellin’ it all wrong!” – in-between lobbing little grenades of exposition. It’s aiming for Deadpool-style snark but this endless meta-commentary on Screenwriting 101 soon grates, and by the point Harley’s deconstructing the villain’s lines in real time it feels obnoxious.
The crushingly glib tone also leaves much of the movie feeling dramatically weightless. That’s a shame, given there’s rich emotional potential here, from Harley taking on a quasi-maternal role with young pickpocket Cassandra Cain to a final reckoning with toxic male ego. But these beats never quite land with any kind of depth, surrendered to the film’s pathological need to keep smirking, always smirking.
While director Cathy Yan brings flashes of visual inventiveness – witty animated graphics frequently punctuate scenes, and there’s an appealing Pop Art sensibility – she struggles with the action. A final act showdown in a funhouse feels inert in spite of the visual possibilities of the location, the camera simply tracking fight choreography instead of throwing the audience into it.
Only in an all-too-fleeting musical sequence, parodying Monroe’s “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”, do you glimpse the kind of demented flair that might have given this movie an energy worthy of its charismatic train-wreck of a hero.
Extras Making-of content is salami-sliced into six featurettes, including a general overview (eight minutes), a more rewarding look at the film’s production design and Pop Art aesthetic (10 minutes), an effects overview that reveals the real life German Shepherd behind the CGI hyena (six minutes) and a piece focusing on Roman Sionis (five minutes).
A look at the film’s costume design (eight minutes) explains the filmmakers’ desire to banish the male gaze – “We try to avoid doing egregious bustier moments” – while the final featurette showcases Harley’s roller derby fixation (four minutes). There’s plentiful behind-the-scenes footage in these documentaries but overall they feel generic.
You also get a fairly titter-free gag reel (two minutes) and Birds Eye View Mode, allowing you to watch along with insights from cast and filmmakers. Don’t shush them or you’ll end up with a baseball bat in your mush.
Margot Robbie was inspired to include a roller derby sequence after reading a DC New 52 Harley Quinn story.
A final act showdown in a funhouse feels inert