by Chris Feil
Cathy Yan returns Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn to the screen after the regrettable Suicide Squad, and it’s somewhat of a rebirth in more was than one. Now single but not fully exorcized from her sublimating relationship with the Joker, Harley is looking to stand on her own two feet. Yet Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) again aligns her with a newly birthed group of crimefighters, this time in an all-female set of not-so-anti heroes.
But without the protection of her association to her former lover, all of the many people Harley has wronged are out for blood. This throws her into a plot with Ewan McGregor’s slimeball billionaire Roman Sionis, a feckless superbaddy hunting a lost diamond with the key to a slaughtered mafia family’s fortune. Those looking to stop Sionis (or Black Mask, when it suits the film) make up Harley’s eventual Birds comrades: Rosie Perez’s beleaguered Detective Renee Montoya, Jurnee Smollett-Bell’s songstress Dinah Lance, Ella Jay Basco’s young pickpocket Cassandra Cain, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s crossbow-wielding Huntress.
If Harley Quinn is merely a vessel to introduce an engrossing batch of new characters, Robbie and Yan usher in another potential franchise with a surprising lack of cynicism, given the nature of most of DC’s filmic output. Much of the film’s tone matches that of its central heroine’s manic, glitterbomb goofiness, charming instead of grating largely because they don’t take themselves at all seriously. The music cues come as steadily as the wisecracks and the neons, but it never feels like a merchandising ploy. Instead, like the fried egg and American cheese sandwich that Harley pines for, Birds of Prey is a lot of uncomplicated fun. Special credit is due to Erin Benach’s mixed media costuming for remembering a crucial element in superhero fun is a campily iconic wardrobe.
The film also succeeds as a cuckoo ensemble piece. Finally, a movie begins to earn Rosie Perez again, letting her natural charisma take hold in the kind of no-bullshit role that suits her perfectly. McGregor is oddly well-suited to playing a villain that is essentially anthropomorphized cocaine (though Chris Messina as his henchman Victor Zsasz is trying to do A Thing that doesn’t gel with the film’s naturally composed oddness). Winstead offers an alternate comedic energy to the film while being its most invigorating source of hard-hitting action hi-jinx. Emotionally, Jurnee Smollett-Bell is our access point thanks to the actress’s compassionate naturalism.
But Robbie remains at the center of the film’s hopscotching axis. There’s something much more comedically precise in her madcap than meets the eye, an amalgam of reference points both refined and confectionary. Like a Bugs Bunny by way of Pop Rocks, the lunacy is a mask for her palpable (if overtly mainstream) wit. She does this schtick better and with less self-aggrandizement than her male counterparts, and that’s why it’s so refreshing.
Birds of Prey follows a familiar formula for other pseudo-anarchic and violent superhero subversions. But what sets this take apart from the Deadpools of the multiplex is its reversal of their toxicity - Birds of Prey just wants to give a gleefully chaotic good time at the movies that also serves as a rebuttal to its brethren’s toxic masculinity. Is the longwindedness of the film’s full title a subtle jab at Birdman, the supposed skewering of the superhero genre’s place in the culture that is nevertheless deeply rooted in male bullshit? Maybe so. No surprise that the film’s breeze almost casts off the lingering acrid scent of those films.
Grade: B