Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, or as it was known briefly prior to its “re-branding”, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is the partially-stand-alone, partially-preempted-franchise-starter follow-up to David Ayer’s 2016 film Suicide Squad. The latter was by all accounts a complete dumpster fire and one of my biggest letdowns of that year. Birds of Prey continues to follow Suicide Squad member Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), but nearly all other references to the previous film have been scrubbed clean in an effort to soft reboot the property. Meanwhile, nobody is complaining.
While it retains some surface qualities of its predecessor, Birds of Prey takes a step back and targets a more focused and smaller-scale story. In the midst of a breakup with the Joker, the object of her Stockholm Syndrome, Harley stumbles into the middle of the crime goings-on of Roman Sionis aka Black Mask (Ewan McGregor) involving a missing diamond. While attempting to navigate her way in life without the protection of her now-ex-partner-in-crime, her path crosses with a handful of other women all orbiting Sionis including an assassin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a Gotham detective (Rosie Perez), and his newly-appointed driver/club entertainer (Jurnee Smollett-Bell).
A good majority of the film is spent introducing these characters and arranging the pieces to set up for the final convergence of plot threads in the final act. It feels as if a lifetime has passed by the time the primary characters are actually in the same room together, let alone dealing with the climax of the film. Making matters worse, each time a new character is introduced, the film has to clumsily rewind and re-contextualize their part in the story, retreading scenes we’ve already seen, making carefully sure that we’re all on the same page. It’s a very inefficient way to make use of the fairly lean 109-minute run-time.
Whereas Suicide Squad feels like a bad script that has been further butchered by its editing, Birds of Prey actually feels like there’s a great movie somewhere in there. The performances, while perhaps a bit uneven, run the gamut from good to really great. McGregor and Robbie are the top tier standouts of the film, chewing scenery and hamming it up just in line with what I feel the film really wants to be: fun and irreverent. The former nails his take on the staple of Batman rogue’s gallery as a sadistic yet flamboyant crime lord that makes for a perfect local antagonist who isn’t threatening to destroy the world for once. Instead, he’s just trying to make himself rich and perhaps peel a few faces off in the process.
Judging its quality against Suicide Squad in any respect even feels beneath Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey. Side-by-side it excels in nearly every aspect, but still manages to fall a hair shy of being something worth unconditionally recommending. Harley’s break from Joker is emblematic of the movie’s attempt to differentiate itself from its studio’s former failure. Her emancipation was successful at ushering in a more coherent and frankly all-around better movie, but at the expense of under-performing financially, potentially derailing the spin-off film it so deliberately sets up. It’s truly a bittersweet transitional chapter for Harley Quinn.
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