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 (021420)
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), is a
spin-off from David Ayer’s messy and quite frankly terrible 2016 film
Suicide
Squad. The only thing returning from that abysmal film is Margot Robbie’s take
on Harley Quinn. Birds of Prey starts as a breakup story, with a montage of
Harley processing her breakup with Mr. J (thankfully Jared Leto does not reprise
his Joker), having fun with breakup clichés and blowing up chemical plants, as
one does. And then Harley finds herself caught in the middle of a few people
with different agendas all searching for a diamond encoded with bank codes to a
secret mob fortune. The film is extremely exposition-heavy, introducing five or
six main characters and connecting them all together.
We first meet Gotham City Police detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), who
battles an alcohol problem and structural inequality. Perez handles the role
well, which is no surprise, but the performance might be more effective if it
wasn’t lamp-shaded multiple times as a riff on cop movies. Each character is
basically lifted from their own genre and mashed together in this film. Aside
from Montoya, Dinah Lance (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), a noir nightclub singer for a
crime boss, Helena Bertinelli (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a vigilante out for
vengeance for her murdered mafia family, and Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco) a
young pickpocket, are all caught up in the search for the diamond. Smollett-Bell
gives a wonderfully understated performance as Lance, and the way she meshes
with Winstead’s vigilante–both characters burdened by family legacies–is
extremely satisfying. All of these women have targets on their backs placed
there by Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), aka Black Mask, a feudal-minded crime
boss out to take over Gotham. McGregor clearly relishes every gold-leafed
article of clothing, his eyeliner, and other artifacts of Sionis’ former life of
luxury before being cut off by his wealthy family. He’d feel right at home in an
R-rated take on Joel Schumacher’s Gotham City.
Birds of Prey feels like a Deadpool movie starring Harley Quinn, and like that
franchise, it struggles to bring a cult character to the screen while capturing
what made the character popular in the first place. Harley Quinn has developed
from her original Batman: The Animated Series incarnation as the Joker’s moll to
that of a full-fledged character in the comics who has left the Joker behind.
But her larger cultural footprint, including
Suicide
Squad, still has her
tethered to Mr. J. Harley states early on in the film that she needs to discover
her identity beyond her dependence on the Joker. But within the course of the
film, that promised journey of self-discovery never actualizes beyond her mere
survival. There’s nothing in Birds of Prey like
Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot)
climbing out of the trenches, or Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) dispatching Yon-Rogg
(Jude Law) with the smallest effort in
Captain Marvel. It’s not that Harley
needs to reform or completely dispatch her demons, but she never moves beyond
“The Joker’s ex” in this story. It feels like a disservice to the character.
Just like
Deadpool, the film seems to feel that fans want her packaged inside a
little box exactly the way they like her already and not changing too much.
Structurally, the script evokes Harley’s thought patterns, jumping back and
forth to fill in back-story. There’s also omnipresent voiceover from Quinn’s
character, which also creates distance between the audience and the action. And
because of the structure, Birds of Prey feels it necessary to treat us to the
same flashback three times in a film that clocks in just slightly under two
hours. It keeps the film from finding a rhythm, lurching back and forth rather
than moving forward through the story. Birds of Prey tries really hard to give
each of its characters a full back-story, but that means a lot of exposition.
The cast also has wonderful chemistry, but the film keeps them apart for almost
the entire runtime, which exacerbates the feeling that it takes a long time to
get going. The final action sequence, where all of the characters are finally in
the same space at the same time, is a ton of fun. But staying engaged throughout
the movie to get to that is sometimes a struggle. Birds of Prey still struggles
with hewing to the aesthetic template of Zack Snyder, and scenes set on Gotham
City streets suffer with this the most. Whenever breaks free of that aesthetic,
the film shines, like in two of its primary locations: Sionis’ Black Mask Club
and the abandoned funhouse hideout. Both are intensively designed, approaching
garishness. Each brings to mind the Schumacher and the 1966 Batman television
show in the best of ways.
The things I liked about Birds of Prey were the things that felt distinct
because they weren’t concerned with maintaining a sense of realism. The best
sequence in the film is a fantasy dance number of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best
Friend” featuring Harley and Sionis. It’s very similar to the “You’ll Never
Know, Just How Much, I Love You” cutaway in
The Shape of Water, albeit with a
vastly different tone. The setup for it is interesting, as it is a moment of
literal escapism for Quinn, and her dancing with Sionis has interesting
implications. Maybe he was originally supposed to be her rebound guy? With the
amount of voiceover and how short this elaborately staged sequence is, it feels
like this film was given enough “studio notes” to force it back into the box,
which is disappointing.
The action sequences are fun enough, but the story grinds to a halt to have a
fight and then picks it up on the other side. Action, like musical numbers, work
best when they advance the story, develop character, or provide some kind of
narrative momentum. Here, they feel like boxes being checked. The final sequence
is the highlight of the film in this regard as well, but the film struggles to
maintain energy for most of its runtime.
The parts of Birds of Prey that work are extremely fun, but there’s too long of
a wait to get there. I especially hope to see more from Jurnee Smollett-Bell and
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, whether in these roles or in another movie. And I look
forward to Cathy Yan’s next movie as director. While a vast improvement over
Suicide
Squad, Birds of Prey is a disappointment for staying too close to the
template. Death by a thousand studio notes designed to sell Funko pops.
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