Birds of Prey shouldn’t work. It is stylistically (and, uh, actually) a sequel to Suicide Squad, which our own Kyle Pinion once called “a film so bad, it makes me long for the return of Zack Snyder to shelter us from the oncoming storm that is David Ayer’s Four Loko take on the DC Universe.” It’s directed by Cathy Yan, an indie filmmaker with a single feature credit to her name, a little-seen (but critically liked) dramedy called Dead Pigs. And Margot Robbie is a tremendously talented actress, but was there really a huge clamoring for a return of her “Daddy’s Lil Monster” take on Harley Quinn? And aren’t we already on to a different, somehow equally shitty Joker now? We were tentatively excited for Birds of Prey here at ScreenRex, but now we’ve actually seen the thing.
Birds of Prey shouldn’t work. But it fucking does. This movie is a delight throughout. The cast is great, the action is clean, inventive, and mean, the design is tremendous. Birds of Prey fucking slaps. You love to see it.
“Do you know what a harlequin is?”
Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) is feeling a bit lost after a bad break-up with the Joker (not pictured). When word gets out that Quinn and the Joker are no longer together, every low life who has it out for her comes knocking. And some of these lowlives, like gang boss Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor) and his psycho henchman Mr. Zsasz (Chris Messina), have enough pull in the city to really make things hard for her. To get out from under there thumb, Quinn promises to help retrieve a diamond stolen by Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco). But she’s not the only person looking out for Cain. Detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) is on Quinn’s back, while Sionis’ lounge singer, Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) is keeping an eye out for the girl. All while someone is hunting down mob figures throughout Gotham with ruthless efficiency.
While the movie is called Birds of Prey, this is Harley’s story. Think of it like a backdoor pilot for a full Birds of Prey film, as Harley’s desperate bid for survival brings Montoya, Huntress, and Canary together. Perhaps the biggest disappointment in the film is how rarely its leads intersect. Mary Elizabeth Winstead has a deeply off-kilter manic quality that only gets better as she bounces off other members of the crew, but she rarely gets the chance. Which is fine, because she’s always bouncing off something — sometimes herself — but still: I need more Huntress immediately.
As a Harley movie, though? It rocks. Margot Robbie isn’t playing the Timm/Dini Harley, hewing closer to the Palmiotti/Conner take, but unlike in Suicide Squad, she feels like an actual human being. She’s just… amped up. Robbie’s Harley is someone who has gargantuan emotions and little self-control, but she also has a history. Her romanticism peaks through, as does her background as a psychiatrist. Harley Quinn should by all rights feel like the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but Robbie’s excellent central performance keeps her grounded. It doesn’t hurt that Robbie has ridiculous charisma, of course, but there’s more to her take than that.
“You are so cool.”
The action in this movie is surprisingly excellent, with strong fight choreography and inventive set-pieces. It does rely too much on speed ramping, particularly when the more acrobatic, colorful Harley gets involved, but for the most part it uses the technique well, highlighting visually interesting shots instead of just prolonging the action. And they manage to make each character’s fighting and movement feel unique. Harley is acrobatic; Montoya is a brass-knuckle brawler; Huntress is a rage-fueled maniac. We don’t see enough of them together, but when we do, they’re still characters. Hell, in one set-piece, Harley fights with glitter, smoke bombs, a baseball bat, and a giant brick of cocaine, which… pretty much sums up the character.
The villains, Roman and Mr. Zsasz, have a little less to say in the action department, unfortunately. McGregor and Messina give phenomenal performances, but they don’t have much to say or do in the action department. Messina’s Zsasz has a deeply threatening aura that my partner described as “uncomfortably hot,” but when push comes to shove, he never really goes deeper than that aura. McGregor’s effete, hedonistic performance, on the other hand, is less threatening and more of a ‘banality of evil’-type. My favorite kind of action is often between equal opponents facing off against one another. I love a real give-and-take to the fight. Sadly, Birds of Prey‘s villains can’t stand up to its heroes. Waves of anonymous henchmen it is!
There is also one… weird problem: There’s clearly an action scene that got wholesale cut from the film, but nothing surrounding it got cut. The film leads right up to the scene — sets up multiple antagonists who are literally at the door — and then just… skips it? There’s never any comment. It keeps the emotional tension of the moment, but… you know, it makes no sense. The movie literally just forgets that it started a big action set piece. It’s one of the strangest editing errors I’ve ever seen. Part of me wonders if it was indicative of a studio not having enough confidence in the project to order reshoots to better set that scene up, but as it is, there’s a series of scenes in the middle, and not small ones, that simply… aren’t there.
“I saved the world…”
Strikingly, there are no world-shaking stakes to this one. Suicide Squad had A LOT of problems, but one of the biggest was its preposterous stakes. Why send a team of regular people to fight a god monster? Where exactly was Superman or Wonder Woman? Why did anything that happened in that film, you know… happen? Birds of Prey has no such problems. The stakes are never really higher than a single young girl’s life, but because Cass is charmingly played by Ella Jay Basco, they don’t need to be. Saving the world is an easy choice. Here, the question is simpler but more interesting: Will Harley give up something to save a single person?
Credit goes to Christina Hodson, an up-and-coming screenwriter whose work has, thus far, been excellent. Unforgettable is one of the wildest rides of the 2010s in ways both good and bad, but it’s Bumblebee was really something special. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the writer behind Bumblebee, which managed to single-handedly save the deeply bad Transformers franchise, would be able to keep her sights squarely on her characters. Even tertiary characters like Huntress have a genuinely emotional beats, and emotional beats that land unpredictably. These aren’t just cartoon characters, even as the violence veers into shockingly brutal slapstick at times.
And, of course, director Cathy Yan does a remarkable job here. This movie could easily slide into being a tonal mess, but Yan manages a complicated central performance, a narrative that bounces every which way, a considerable amount of action, and much more. And she does it in style. Birds of Prey looks great. There are issues with the film, particularly with the pacing in the first half-hour or so, but ultimately, Birds of Prey is a damn fine film, maybe DC’s best since The Dark Knight – only time will tell if its charms continue to surpass the next best DC offering, Shazam!. Yan, Hodson, Robbie, and the rest of the cast made a charming, entertaining film that works on multiple levels. Despite its issues, I had a blast throughout the film.
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) comes out February 7th, 2020 in theaters everywhere. Written by Christina Hodson and directed by Cathy Yan, Birds of Prey stars Margot Robbie, Rosie Perez, and Ewan McGregor.