BIRDS OF PREY

Short on plot but high on helium, Harley Quinn’s latest adventure succeeds on sheer enthusiasm, fine performances and impressive fight scenes...

With the new Joker just too weird to date, Harley steps out on her own...

The latest DC movie starts with Harley Quinn splitting from her infamous long-term BF. Whether this has anything to do with her seeing his last film is unclear, but it’s difficult to imagine this Harley looking at that Joker and thinking ‘Phwooarrr!”’ We jest, but there’s surely no cinematic universe in which continuity makes it through entirely intact. And the DCEU has been a lot more fun since the movies stopped trying to be the MCU but darker. So like Shazam!, Birds Of Prey doesn’t play by the rules — it changes the rules. It’s ostensibly a sequel to Suicide Squad, but it doesn’t look or feel like it, and pays mere lip service to events in its predecessor. Very few will be sorry about that…

That’s not to say Birds Of Prey is an unqualified triumph: it’s difficult to imagine Margot Robbie getting an Oscar nomination for channelling Lori Petty’s Tank Girl for her kooky, helium-voiced take on Harley. But it’s a refreshingly unfettered film that creates (or recreates) the tone and world and characters it needs to tell the story it wants to tell. So we have the newly ‘emancipated’ Harley (the full, unwieldy title is Birds Of Prey And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn) finally ridding herself of her Joker dependency and attempting to carve her own niche. She’s soon drawn into what’s essentially a screwball comedy crime caper, with every lowlife in the city chasing after a girl, Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), who’s swallowed a diamond that belongs to psycho crime boss Roman Sionis, aka Black Mask (Ewan McGregor). Also drawn into the plot are Sionis’s nightclub singer Dinah Lance (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), aka Black Canary; hard-boiled cop Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez); and Helena Bertinelli, aka The Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who has her own longgestating grudge against Sionis.

There’s not an awful lot more to the plot, to be honest. This is all style over substance

— or stylisation over substance, maybe. The deliberately disorientating, out-of-sequence flashbacking and cartoonish characters mix with 15-rated violence and language to make this a comic book spin on the Lock, Stock/Tarantino brand of gangster movies. Largely, it works.

There’s also a healthy dose of Deadpool-style voiceovers, though the copious animated, graffiti-style annotations hark back — like Robbie’s performance — to the things that actually worked in Tank Girl. Hell, there’s even a song and dance routine for Harley, though one not quite as lavish as Tank Girl’s “Let’s Do It”, sadly. McGregor, meanwhile, is massively enjoyable as the campy Black Mask, one of the most loathsome villains in a comic book movie yet, and has some of the best lines.

It’s daft. It’s punkish. It’s paced like a bullet ricocheting round a dustbin, and it’s very funny in places, though the splattershot approach to the gags means that some inevitably work less well than others. The fight scenes, with choreography input from the stunt team behind the John Wick movies, are among some of the most genuinely entertaining and innovative that we’ve seen in a long time.

Scriptwriter Christina Hodson, who previously made Bumblebee a lot more fun and full of real heart than anyone had expected, once again finds the humanity in bizarre situations, and also makes sure none of the female characters are wasted. Not that the film is trying to ram home a feminist message: it just has women being as bad-ass (and morally dubious, and capable of dumb decisions) as men, while still being women rather than male archetypes cast as women.

We have driving creative force Margot Robbie to thank for that, as this movie was her idea. Which makes it all the more a shame that she’s the main weak link

in the film. While the other leads all feel more rounded, Harley’s constant, one-note quipping — while loyal to the character we know — makes her a little irritating and onedimensional. It’s possibly a no-win situation: would fans even want a Harley who emotes and has real, human issues?

Birds Of Prey is slight, for sure; there’s no real depth to it, and the plot is near non-existent. But it has an energy, buzz and full-throttle commitment to its central conceit that’s downright infectious. Fantabulous, even. Dave Golder