Review: Birds of Prey

Recently single Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) reluctantly teams up with assorted others to take on nasty nightclub owner Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor). Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays a vigilante known as ‘The Huntress’, Rosie Perez is a police detective, Jurnee Smollett-Bell plays singer Dinah Lance AKA Black Canary, and Chris Messina plays Sionis’ chief thug Victor.

 

“Suicide Squad” was a lethargic mess whose constant music montage character introductions kept it from getting out of first gear. A spin-off featuring one of its bright spots in Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn didn’t seem all that appetising to me (let alone a supposed sequel coming soon too). Sure, Robbie gave a fun performance in an otherwise fairly dire experience, but I wasn’t exactly hotly anticipating this 2020 girl-powered spin-off from director Cathy Yan (whose background is largely in shorts) and screenwriter Christina Hodson (“Bumblebee”). I was right to be sceptical too, because this annoying, terminally snarky film is almost twice as bad. And if you didn’t like Jared Leto’s pop-punk Joker (I didn’t mind him, actually), boy are you gonna have issue with this film’s limp villain.

 

The problems start early with yet another Snyder-esque dependency on music montages. I enjoy Joan Jett’s ‘I Hate Myself for Loving You’ as much as the next person, but I was tired of the trope not long after watching Snyder’s enjoyable “Watchmen”. The big issue however, is that the film is pitched as a girl-powered lark, an over-the-top comedy. I like a good tongue-in-cheek action movie as much as the next person, but this is “Iron Man” levels of irritating, self-defeating snark – and wall-to-wall at that. With an accent that heads hard into Michelle Pfeiffer in “Married to the Mob” territory, Robbie’s performance is very…very, very much. 10 minutes of it was far too much for me, actually. Perhaps it’s a case of a character being better suited to the support cast than the lead. People who don’t know what good acting is will likely applaud Robbie for ‘going for broke’, when in reality she’s giving a loud, shallow, and annoying performance with no soul. It wasn’t long before I was convinced that Harley Quinn should never have been emancipated, and I’m pretty sure that’s the opposite of the intent here.

 

I don’t like overly mopey, Nolan-esque superhero films generally, but this is very much more “Superman III” than “Superman”, or far more “Thor: Ragnarok” than “Avengers: Infinity War”. A little of it goes…not terribly far at all really, and Harley Quinn is far too gleefully violent for the film’s female empowerment ambitions to succeed (This is Robbie’s second attempt at turning a villain into a feminist icon after the bullshit Tonya Harding propaganda piece). I’m sorry, but the character is a sociopath, much as the filmmakers probably want to paint her as the victim of misogyny or something. That’s an insult to real victims of such things. The songs are cool, and it’s always great to see Steven Williams on screen, but that’s it for positives. I normally love Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and she’s good in the action scenes but otherwise she comes off like an amateur. Her character is also played too broadly to take seriously even for a superhero story. Remember when comedy was secondary in comic book/superhero films? I can’t get into a story like this when it’s all snark all the time. It’s what killed “Iron Man” and “Deadpool” for me, though I think the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films got the mix just about right.

 

The always annoying Rosie Perez is insufferable and looks entirely bored. A dreadful waste of the talented Chris Messina too, miscast as a dopey thug. Being largely unrecognisable here might help him escape the stench this film emits. In fact, the film has such an abundance of characters that you end up feeling unsure as to who exactly the film is even about. Jurnee Smollett-Bell gives the best performance and plays the most interesting character, but it’s also her character whose presence and emphasis ends up making the structure too messy. She’s the most likeable person here, but is she the star of this thing or is Harley Quinn? At best I can say that the screenplay is still more coherent than “Suicide Squad”, but only just and it’s worse in every single other way. Like Ms. Robbie, the talented Ewan McGregor pitches his unsubtle performance for the kiddie crowd, whilst the violence and language pitch the film in the opposite direction. It’s McGregor’s worst performance to date, by far in a film that has way more in common with “Catwoman” than it would probably like to admit.

 

Good-looking, but boring, ham-fisted and obnoxious comic outing pitches itself far too much into overbearing comedy territory at the expense of audience interest in the characters and story. It’s all snark and montages, and no matter how cool the songs are, it gets tiresome quickly. As does Robbie’s squeaky-voiced, mugging performance, which when combined with Rosie Perez’s usual nasal Brooklyn-ese proves unbearable. Worse, it tries to make a female empowerment film with a psycho murderess for a protagonist. The message is rank. Needless to say I very much resisted that...and the film overall.

 

Rating: D