Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn has always had a lot of potential. First introduced in 2016’s Suicide Squad, she’s stood out as a chirpy, somewhat psychotic girlfriend of the clown prince of crime, Joker. In Birds of Prey: The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, Robbie gets to sink her teeth into a lot of juicy character development in a story that highlights her off-kilter world view and blends character moments with competent action and pop culture references.
While there are four other women who are part of the film’s central narrative, this is, without a doubt Harley’s story. She starts off the film commiserating (and gallivanting around Gotham) after the Joker breaks up with her. She soon finds herself in crime lord Roman Sionis’ (Ewan McGregor) crosshairs and gets roped into finding a valuable diamond that a street urchin (and pickpocket) named Cassandra ends up swallowing. There’s a gutsy, tough as nails cop named Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) pursuing her, and she has an informant in Roman’s operations in the form of his lounge singer (and enforcer) Dinah Lance (Jurnee Smollet-Bell). Then there’s an orphaned mafia princess named Helena Bertinelli (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who’s seeking revenge for her family’s death.
With all these plot points, you can’t fault the movie for sometimes veering off-course. It opens in a lively fashion, but soon gets into a rut in the middle point as Harley’s narration jumps around time, trying to tie the stories of the five female characters together. Still, the script from Christina Hodson (Bumblebee) does mostly well in tying the film’s message of female emancipation with the plot and action. Whether it be Harley recovering from a toxic relationship or Renee dealing with her disparaging, credit-stealing coworkers, there’s a burgeoning sense of female solidarity in the narrative.
This film has long been Margot Robbie’s passion project, to the the extent that the working title for the film was ‘Fox Force Five’, the fictional all-female spy team from an unaired pilot in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction starring Uma Therman’s Mia Wallace. While this film does share some sensibilities with Tarantino’s classic, its tone is much more in line with the Deadpool franchise, which was probably watched extensively by the film’s writers. Harley often breaks the fourth wall, and there’s a surreal sequence where she hallucinates being a in dance number while being threatened by Sionis.
The secondary cast is mostly solid, and while they don’t get as much focus as Harley does (especially Helena, who appears around the halfway mark), they get to establish their characters with various bits of backstory being drip fed into the narrative, or as in Helena’s case, being shown through flashbacks. Roman Sionis (who also goes by Black Mask) is portrayed competently by McGregor. He shows flashes of personality, but falls short of shining as much as Harley does. He has a gay lover in the form of Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina), who is a mafia hitman instead of a serial killer in this incarnation.
The characters are changed considerably from their comic book incarnations, something which may rub some hardcore fans the wrong way.
Also, the film takes some time in getting all five women together, and while the result is entertaining to watch, one can’t help but wonder about the interactions we missed out on by not having them together sooner.
Visually, the film has a distinct palette, from the costume design to the cinematography which makes Harley’s colors pop. The soundtrack, however, often feels too on the nose, with songs such as “I Hate Myself for Loving You” and “Barracuda” overshadowing what’s happening on screen. The action scenes are suitably kinetic, which makes sense when you consider that Chad Staheski (John Wick) and his stunt team 87Eleven assisted in conceiving the set pieces.
Birds of Prey is a breezy, electric ride that marries its feminist sensibilities well to the pop vibes of this version of Gotham and its characters. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but does enough to entertain throughout its runtime.
It’s unfortunate that its opening is the lowest of the DCEU films so far, but maybe it will find new life in streaming and home entertainment once its theatrical run is over.