I finally got to Birds of Prey! Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) has left the Suicide Squad behind, and due to her popularity, finds herself entangling with a new bunch of DC heroes and villains. Following a split from the Joker, Quin is fair game for murder, and Black Mask (Ewan McGregor) is at the top of the pantheon to kill her. But Black Mask also has a very important diamond coming into Gotham City, that’s gone missing and needs to be found. Quinn talks her way out of trouble by promising to assist in locating the rock, or her head is as good as dead. The caper brings in a spate of Gotham’s other players, including Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco) Det. Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), and Zsasz (Chris Messina). The movie jumps back and forth in time as Harley recounts the tale for the audience. Birds of Prey is directed by Cathy Yan.
I had low expectations for this one sadly; the trailers didn’t do much to grab me and the DCEU has been janky at best, including Shazam! and Aquaman in that summation. Suicide Squad was a huge disappointment, and I worried how Harley Quinn would carry a movie when I know her best as a side-kick character for the Joker. Thankfully, I was proven pessimistic, and I had an excellent time with this movie.
Most importantly, Birds of Prey gives Harley Quinn a mission in her wheelhouse, involving hand-to-hand combat and low-level criminal enterprise – fighting demons and a hip-flexing Enchantress with the Suicide Squad was not her bag baby, and it was wrong for anyone to ever expect it to be. The movie also cleverly demonstrates how Quinn can stay one step ahead in the crime game all by herself, by using her psychiatric knowledge for tactical and pre-emptive moves. Quinn is one crazy lady, but she’s also wicked smart; she spasmodically spouts out psycho-jargon to explain why a character will act a certain way, often doubling for comedic affect as well. My all-time favourite moment in this movie comes when Harley Quinn inadvertently sniffs the exploding cocaine bags in police evidence, fuelling her for a really badass fight – this movie takes advantage of a MA rating, making these villains seem completely freed and natural in this crazy city.
What really inspired me was this movie’s interpretation of the Batman world – with over 80 years of Batman stories, I can only think of the ever-growing Batman mythos as an overlapping stack of cellophane, where writers add or pull out layers to create the colour they want. There’s one staunch lens to view Batman that states that when Bruce Wayne donned the cowl, he made a huge impact in cleaning up crime in Gotham; we saw that in The Dark Knight Rises. But then there’s another evaluation that proposes that the presence of a masked vigilante, and the Joker, just sent criminals crazier… Birds of Prey tells their stories. This is really the first time a loopy and matured Gotham has been on film – Black Mask strikes me as an immature rich guy playing criminal mastermind because it seems trendy. Zsasz mutilates himself with marks for his kills for no other reason than to stand out in the crowd. Crime is a standard, where even nine-year-old girls like Cassandra Cain are world-class pick-pocketers, and goons out to retrieve a reward for a lost diamond are a dime a dozen. This interpretation really helps justify the stylistic choices of this movie that felt foreign in Suicide Squad. The macabre, colour, glitter, and all-out effortful design of the costumed characters and the spaces they inhabit, were really out of place previously without context – this movie has come out post-Justice-League and we now firmly understand that Batman and Wonder Woman have been around for a long period, while Superman, Flash and Aquaman are just starting out. Yes, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice showed us the Robin suits, indicating that Batman had been fighting crime for years, but that movie, along with the movies that came before it like Man of Steel, were also super serious and didn’t account for flare. Suicide Squad also had Amanda Waller worried about the existence of superbeings like Superman, whilst metahumans like Diablo and Killer Croc already existed without causing a panic. The beginning of the DCEU brought confusing times; that Flash cameo with Captain Boomerang in Suicide Squad seems more and more out of place every day. But Birds of Prey is exclusively set in Gotham, and coming to an understanding of this location helped me get into how this movie was presenting its story. Renee Montoya helped me get there the most; a cop I was familiar with as a squeaky-clean rookie in the beginning of the cartoon show, Batman: The Animated Series, has now been in the justice system for a long time in Birds of Prey, which indicates the Dark Knight first showed himself many years ago and we are well down the Batman timeline.
I could see how an uninformed audience could have felt jarred when Black Canary saves the day with her voice before any explanation to her abilities in the lead-up – I think it was a bright choice by the movie to not include any metahuman characters, barring that one scene, to keep this already-frantic movie grounded. The movie doesn’t aim to accomplish much more than Suicide Squad did really – a band of new faces come together, each needing an introduction before squaring off against a common enemy. I actually love the theme of emancipation through this movie though; Harley Quinn, along with all the other girls, are looking to free themselves from one tyrannical structure or another. I was also worried how Harley’s hyenas would translate from cartoon to the real world, but Bruce isn’t overused and works for what he is. And as quirky as it may have seemed, it was ridiculously enjoyable to finally see the Joker’s abandoned fairground on the big screen too – there’s something I never knew I wanted until I got it.
This is the third major interpretation of Gotham that we’ve had in recent years, with Joker last year, and The Dark Knight trilogy not that long ago. It’s exciting, and it’s fun that they’ve all been done well – Robert Patterson’s Batman movie is also coming in 2021. It’s strange, we’ve entered an era where Batman movies don’t have to contain Batman anymore; twenty years after Batman & Robin capitulated the franchise, who would have thought a DC cinematic climax could be a showdown between Harley Quinn and Black Mask? I loved seeing some of these lower level faces run amok; I never thought Chris Messina would be the guy to give a fun Zsasz interpretation, but here we are. This is a really positive review, and I was one of the guys who left Suicide Squad thinking it was alright on first viewing – here’s hoping Birds of Prey doesn’t doop me when I look into it again.
Maybe it’s because I have a limited knowledge of the source material, or maybe I know just enough, but Birds of Prey tickled my whiskers, and excited me in a place I didn’t even know was itchy.
4.5
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