Movie Review: Birds of Prey

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)

I am just very slowly going through the backlog of DCEU movies that I haven't reviewed in the past. Birds of Prey probably holds an interestingly special place in my heart because it was the last movie I watched in teh thaeters before the huge pandemic. 

And, well... it's an interesting movie? It's definitely not a bad movie on its own merits, but as part of the expanded DCEU continuity it kind of is a rather odd choice to slot into the movie series' lineup... though I could rant a whole day about the poor choices that the DCEU had done in terms of choosing which superhero movie to make when. So.

I guess my biggest problem with this movie is its branding as a 'Birds of Prey' movie, when the movie is all about Harley Quinn. And it's a pretty great post-New-52 Harley Quinn movie, all things considered. It's just that they kind of tossed in/shoehorned in the Birds of Prey and with the exception of maybe the Huntress's backstory, none of these guys really are adapted well into the big screen. And I don't mind liberties being taken during an adaptation of superhero material, that's for sure, but... but when you change a character so much that really the only common thread is the name -- like Cassandra Cain, who practically has nothing in common with the mute assassin Batgirl from the comics, I really wonder why they decided to even use the character name at all. 

Again, as mentioned above, the movie itself clearly takes a lot of the complains about the very... sexualized and vapid Harley Quinn from the trainwreck of a movie that is 2016's Suicide Squad, took the fact that Margot Robbie is actually a good fit for the character, and ran with it. We go through a pretty solid character arc as she goes all cuckoo, going from her breakup with her abusive boyfriend Joker and then trying to make it on her own as her own woman with a pet hyena. 

She comes into conflict with club owner and gangster boss Roman Sionis (Black Mask in the comics, played by Ewan "Obi-Wan Kenobi" McGregor) who, like most of the underworld, views her as a washout now that she's no longer associated with the Joker. We get that rather glorious scene where she blows up the ACE-Chemicals plant to announce to the world of her moving on from the Joker. And... again, not 100% faithful to the comics, but that's okay. It's a neat little setup not too dissimilar from the recent, well-received Harley Quinn animated series. 

But then the titular Birds of Prey come in and... they're... again, I don't think their individual stories are bad. The actors are serviceable, and the way they're integrated into the Harley/Sionis plot is pretty competently done. It's just that... there's a mixture of them feeling rather obligatory to the movie as a whole (just to make it an ensemble cast and "adapt" another DC property) and their stories kinda being basic. 

The only one who I feel actually gets a pass is the edgy vigilante Huntress, who they actually played up super-seriously. Her Bertinelli mafia family drama is shown to the audience and treated by the Huntress herself as a brooding, badass backstory; her outfit and crossbows are handled reasonably well, and Huntress herself takes herself seriously too... when Harley and the rest of the cast really don't give a shit about her backstory and continually mock her Huntress moniker. It's something that shouldn't be funny -- particularly because I've spent years bitching about superhero adaptations being ashamed of their origins -- but it is. 

The main plot involves a diamond engraved with account numbers tied to the Bertinelli crime family, which is the sort of ridiculous James Bond style plotline that I feel is nice. Said diamond gets stolen by a little girl, Cassandra Cain, who proceeds to swallow it. Sionis and his goons hunt down Cassandra, who befriends Harley Quinn, and... we basically get that as the rather typical 'oh, jackass befriends a young child' plotline. Again, the acting is competent enough to not make the movie drag, but it's also nothing super special at the end of the day. 

Meanwhile, Dinah "Black Canary" Lance is a burlesque singer in Sionis's nightclub who basically gets forced into being his bodyguard... with the rather creepy implications that Sionis has an unhealthy amount of interest in her. This gets Sionis's previous goon, Mr. Zsasz, super-duper jealous in an interaction that some people have read as unrequited romantic interaction? Eh. The two kind of antagonize each other throughout the movie, and also at the climax of the movie we get the revelation that Dinah has metahuman Black Canary powers, which... it's something that the comics character has, but considering how much everything about this movie is toned down to the 'ground-level' superheroes and supervillains, it's a revelation that isn't foreshadowed and doesn't make sense beyond 'it's from the comics'.

Rounding out the cast is GCPD Detective Renee Montoya, who's just this jaded, older lady cop who's the token lawful good member of the cast who tries her best to get everyone that's not evil on the same side. 

And... the movie basically goes through a bunch of action scenes, and a lot of them are just stylish and ridiculous. Your tolerance of the second and third acts of the movie really depends on how much the wacky fireworks-cannon raid of the GCPD and the climactic wacky hijinks rollerblade action scene at one of Gotham City's many, many abandoned funhouse theme parks are. It's a stylish action scene that I won't begrudge since it fits the tone of the movie. There is the typical 'Harley angsts on whether she would sell out her young kiddie friend' storyline, there is Dinah being caught between her status as a Sionis gang employee and an informant to Montoya... again, none of these plotlines are bad at all. It's just... kind of obvious that everything leads up to 'okay, we all hate Sionis, let's team up and beat up his army of masked goons'. 

The movie ends with Sionis dead, while Montoya, Huntress and Black Canary think about starting off a superhero vigilante agency, only for the final shot to be Harley and Cass stealing all the money and driving off into the sunset. 

And... again, it's not a bad movie on its own merits. Playful, wacky, stylish in the action scenes. Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn displays a lot of the fun, lunatic energy that the character has in her solo outings, and free from the terrible 2016 Suicide Squad script and the association with the worst live-action incarnation of the Joker, she gets to shine and be the protagonist of her own movie. Unfortunately, I really do think that the movie would probably work a lot better if it actually went all-in on its focus as a Harley Quinn movie, since a lot of the storylines revolvinga round the Birds of Prey ends up being kind of superfluous and distracting since none of the characters ever grow out of their archetypes. The movie's usage of characters also deviate rather wildly from the source material that it actually is even more baffling when Black Canary utilizes her sonic screams. Again, I don't really like criticizing this movie since it's still a fun watch, but it's just another mediocre movie to tack onto the messy pile of DCEU's portfolio.