Birds of Prey (2020)
dir. Cathy Yan
Rated: R
image: ©2020 Warner Bros. Pictures
Birds of Prey might be the most entertaining DC movie yet – yes, including Wonder Woman – even though I have a few major reservations about it. The cast, just about down to a person, are all going for broke here. Director Cathy Yan’s handling of the action sequences, especially one that involves our hero, a one Harley Quinn, chasing a speeding car on roller skates, is inventive and fresh. The movie’s tone, while still a bit on the bleak side (this is the DC universe, after all), is sarcastic, snide, and overall pretty funny. That all translates into a mostly enjoyable time with this latest comic book movie outing.
Still, the movie’s absolute glee at its own disturbing level of violence was somewhat off-putting. It’s rated R, and I (mostly) knew what I was getting into with a movie about the mentally unbalanced character of Harley Quinn. This is a person who abandoned her career in psychiatry when she became obsessed with The Joker, transforming herself into both his girlfriend and most deranged acolyte. Even with the rating and history of the main character, though, I was left a little queasy. Birds of Prey is a brightly colored, spastic comic book movie that presents as a good ol’ time villains peeling the faces off of their victims and threatening on multiple occasions to gut a 12-year-old like a fish.
The movie also has a belabored approach to its nonlinear storytelling that borders on obnoxious. I lost count of how many times Harley – who narrates the story to us through voice-over – stops the action to double back in order to fill us in on some information she left out or to let us in on the characters’ real motivations. It’s a meta approach – Harley takes a great amount of pleasure out of the fact that she has an audience to impress – that adds, on the whole, successfully, to the sarcastic tone of the picture.
Margot Robbie is the key to what works about Birds of Prey. The actor, whose first outing as Harley Quinn was in the disastrous Suicide Squad – her performance was the only saving grace of that film – brings an absolutely infectious quality to the character. The Aussie’s commitment to and skill with Quinn’s gloriously over-the-top Long Island-y accent is, in a word, fantabulous.
Robbie also gives Quinn a heartfelt arc in Birds – albeit a maternal one that might not sit well with audience members who are tired of seeing “strong female leads” reduced to their mothering instincts – that feels real and earned. At the start of the movie, Harley is dealing with a strong case of the blues in the aftermath of The Joker unceremoniously dumping her. She gets caught up with a pint-sized pick pocket named Cassandra Cain. The adolescent has stolen a priceless diamond from one of the most sadistic crime lords in all of Gotham – Roman Sionis, aka Black Mask.
It doesn’t help matters that Sionis is also out to get Harley for a number of reasons. One of the best bits of the movie is Harley continually stopping the action in order to list the grievances that people who cross her path have with her. Hot on Cassandra and Harley’s trail is Sionis’s best henchman, Victor Zsasz, a man who rivals his boss for unhinged violence.
Make no mistake, Birds of Prey is Harley Quinn’s – and Margot Robbie’s – movie, but the characters – and the women playing them – who will eventually become the team referenced in the title all bring their own off-kilter sensibility to the story.
Rosie Perez is Renee Montoya, a Gotham PD detective whose career has stalled out because her former partner used her work to boost his own ambitions. Jurnee Smollett-Bell plays Dinah Lance/Black Canary, a night club singer working for Sionis who has a voice that can do more than simply entertain. Rounding out the eventual Birds of Prey crew is Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Helena Bertinelli/The Huntress, a vigilante on a mission of revenge.
These three women, in addition to Harley, have all been screwed over by men in some way, and Birds of Prey becomes a satisfying tale of empowerment when they all decide to fight back as a team. That’s the central narrative, but writer Christina Hodson’s story never becomes preachy or overwrought about it.
And the men in the movie are as ridiculously entertaining as they are awful. Ewan McGregor, as the homicidally insane Sionis, hasn’t been this utterly manic in a role since his turn as Mark Renton in the original Trainspotting. Chris Messina is a horrific revelation as Sionis’s sadistic henchman, Zsasz.
There’s enough wit and entertainment here – mostly due to Margot Robbie – to make Birds of Prey a good time. Things aren’t as bleak, overwrought, and downright punishing as the DC movies helmed by Zack Snyder have been. Still, that (un)healthy tinge of ultraviolence is a touch much in a movie that sells itself as fun comic book movie escapism.
