To begin on a positive note, the conveniently-titled Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is a better movie than Suicide Squad. However, one must keep in mind that Suicide Squad is one of the worst things ever; not one of the worst movies ever, but one of the worst things ever. With the bar set that low, I didn’t leave the theater seething with hatred as I did with Suicide Squad, but I didn’t leave happy either. Birds of Prey is a goddamn mess. It’s a terribly written, horribly edited mess made by people that clearly don’t give a shit about the source material.
Aside from just being ridiculous, the title of this movie is also misleading. This is not a Birds of Prey movie; it is a Harley Quinn movie with an elaborate supporting cast (and I’ll get to those motherfuckers in a minute). The plot, if I may use that word loosely, revolves around a diamond that is being sought by the villain Black Mask. Various other characters, chiefly Harley Quinn, come into contact with the diamond and fight over it. It’s honestly one of the most basic and lazy MacGuffin-based plots that I have seen in awhile (MacGuffin = object that the plot revolves around).
Let’s assume for a moment that you don’t give a shit about comic books and just look at this as if it was an original movie with no source material. Even under those parameters, this is a symphony of poor choices. Cathy Yan, the director, desperately, desperately wants this to feel like a Guy Richie movie and will hate-fuck any sense of logic or structure to make that happen. I often didn’t even know where the fuck I was in the plot of this movie because the structure eliminates any sense of time. It is done in an episodic fashion (in an ill-advised attempt to imitate Tarantino) and constantly jumps back and forth between time periods and vaguely-related subplots. Is this scene taking place after the last scene or before it? Who the fuck knows? At one point we were in a flashback for so long that I forgot that it was a flashback until it finally led back to something that we had already seen and I somehow cared even less than I did the first time that I saw it. If you remove all of the flashbacks, flashforwards, talking to the camera and other over-stylized horseshit, I think the events of this movie would span about two minutes.
Now let’s assume that you do care about comics and, oh boy, are you going to hate this. Could somebody please give the producers of these movies a fucking comic book? I would settle for them glancing through Wikipedia for ten minutes, just give me some sign that they give the smallest of shits about any of these characters. One of (and I emphasize “one of”) the biggest problems with Suicide Squad is that the characters barely resembled their comic book counterparts. In the comics, Black Mask is a sadistic, psychotic gangster driven mad by having a mask burned onto his face. Here he is an effeminate gay man that seems to be in a relationship with his chief henchman (for the official record, I would like to say that there is nothing wrong with that and I greatly respect the bravery of this artistic choice). He doesn’t even wear a fucking mask until the end of the movie and then it just seems odd. The goddamn name of the character is Black motherfucking Mask and you lazy assholes couldn’t even get that right?!? In the comics Cassandra Cain is the daughter of two master martial artists and raised from birth to be the world’s deadliest assassin until Batman finds her and recruits her to be Batgirl. In this, she’s a teenaged pickpocket. Well, she is Asian though, and I guess that’s the only characteristic needed to call her Cassandra Cain. Black Canary is now a lounge singer and has switched races so that she is actually black (for the official record, I would like to say that there is nothing wrong with that and I greatly respect the bravery of this artistic choice). Huntress is running around shooting people in the fucking neck with a crossbow, which is like having Robin run around chopping people’s heads off with an ax. That henchman that I mentioned earlier is Victor Zsasz, a serial killer in the comics that I didn’t even realize was supposed to be in the movie until somebody mentioned his name and I responded with “oh fuck you.”
The sad thing here is that the casting is right. Margot Robbie is an excellent choice for Harley Quinn and I still think she could pull this off if she was working with a half-decent script. Rosie Perez is a great choice for Renee Montoya and Mary Elizabeth Winstead tries her damndest to make Huntress interesting (also, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is hotter than Margot Robbie; yeah, I said that). Ewen McGregor seems to be working off of an older version of the script where he was playing a gay version of The Riddler instead of Black Mask, but he is a great actor (for the official record, I would like to say that there would be nothing wrong with a gay version of the Riddler and I would greatly respect the bravery of that artistic choice). My point is that this could have worked if the filmmakers (director, writer, producer, editor, all of them) had even the slightest fucking idea what they were doing. Still not as bad as Suicide Squad, though. Seriously, fuck that movie.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_of_Prey_(2020_film)#/media/File:Birds_of_Prey_(and_the_Fantabulous_Emancipation_of_one_Harley_Quinn).jpg
