Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 49 minutes
Director: Cathy Yan
Quick Impressions:
I was stunned when I found out that a lot of people didn’t like Suicide Squad. Of course, I saw the movie late, at home, because my son was about fourteen months old when it came out, and we didn’t get to the theater much at that time. I will confess that if you were to ask me what happens in the movie, I would answer, “Harley Quinn.”
Okay, I remember a little more than that. Viola Davis wants to assemble a team of villains (because she saw Batman v Superman and has concerns). Jared Leto gets 30 seconds to be the Joker (after a year of mailing co-stars dead rats). Enchantress possesses Cara Delevingne, and she won’t give up until everyone explodes her. Also, Will Smith is there, but he won’t be back. (I know that’s a terrible summary, but it’s hard to pay close attention with a toddler pulling focus.)
The point is, my main takeaway from the film was Harley Quinn. So I thought Suicide Squad was great because who doesn’t like Harley Quinn? (Our family also loved the song “Heathens.”)
I mean, everyone likes Harley, right? Marvel may turn out eerily consistent, high quality super hero movies, but when it comes to Halloween costumes, D.C. is winning, especially women’s Halloween costumes. Between the two of them, Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman own Halloween.
But what’s great about Harley is that she’s more than a great costume, she’s a fascinating character, thoughtfully brought to life by a wonderful actress. (Gal Gadot is spot on as Wonder Woman, too.)
I knew I would enjoy Birds of Prey because if Margot Robbie is going to play Harley Quinn, I’ll gladly watch her do anything–order a breakfast sandwich, drop a breakfast sandwich, eat a breakfast sandwich. You name it.
Actually, Margot Robbie doesn’t even have to play Harley Quinn. I love her as an actress. I have never seen her give a bad performance, and I always love to hear her thoughtful explanations of her process. She can play anyone she wants, doing anything she pleases, and I will happily pay money to see her movie in the theater (now that my baby is older). I was excited to see her reprise Harley, and intrigued that she also produces Birds of Prey since she always creates such interesting projects.
I also love Ewan McGregor. I’ve been a fan since Trainspotting, and our whole Star Wars loving family is dying for the Obi-Wan series to premiere on Disney+ already.
The two of them are absolutely outstanding in this hard-to-classify D.C. film. (Is it a sequel? A stand-alone spin-off? The beginning of two separate (but momentarily overlapping) franchises?)
What surprised me was how much I enjoyed the other characters, too. Rosie Perez, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ella Jay Basco, Chris Messina, and (especially) Jurnee Smollett-Bell are also fantastic. I know Margot Robbie intends to keep playing Harley Quinn for as long as possible, but I hope we get a
Birds of Prey sequel, too.
The Good:
Margot Robbie makes such a spectacular Harley Quinn. She plays her like a wild mix of Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow, and a crazed hyena. (There actually is a hyena in this movie who turns out to be very sweet…from a certain point of view.) We’ve all already seen Margot Robbie as the character, but I brought this up because I wanted to mention that in this film, she repeatedly reminded me of Lesley Ann Warren as Norma Cassady in Victor Victoria. (I mean, she’s a little like everybody who plays a character with this self-presentation style. If you’ve seen Little Shop of Horrors, you’ll probably also think of Ellen Greene’s Audrey.) For some reason, though, this time around, I kept thinking of Warren’s Victor Victoria performance in particular, possibly because of Black Canary. (You’ll see what I mean when you watch the movie.)
Robbie brings such delicious crazed energy to Harley, somehow managing to make her sociopathic and sweet all at once. She endears her to us, yet we never lose sight of the fact that Harley is deranged and will never be stable or (conventionally) moral.
The film wins points from me by beginning with an animated zip through Harley’s backstory. What I liked is that the movie pointedly emphasizes that Harley was disturbed with sociopathic tendencies long before she met the Joker. So there’s no question of separating her from a bad influence and rehabilitating her. He didn’t turn her bad. She’s her own (wicked) person. I think any film that wants to give us a Joker-free Harley must establish her own villainy early and emphasize it often. Removing her from Joker’s influence doesn’t make her good. She’s a villain in her own right.
My husband also liked the way Harley keeps emphasizing her education and occasionally pausing to analyze fellow characters.
I also enjoyed the way the film looked to Harley’s haphazard narration for structure. We’re getting a Harley Quinn movie all right. Not only does it focus on her, but it shows us the way that she thinks in the very way the action unfolds.
Ewan McGregor is also amazing as Roman Sionis/Black Mask. So often, comic book movies have failed to give us satisfyingly unique villains. (D.C. is especially guilty of this.) But McGregor plays Black Mask as a sociopath who appears to experience genuine feeling only when he wants something he can’t have. For him, something is as often as not someone. In his mind, everything should be his. He’s a rabid collector and prone to fits of palpable distress when thwarted. And when he’s distressed, he calms himself by playing humiliating, sadistic games with others. Then sometimes (on a whim) he slices their faces off. Fun guy. But McGregor makes him not only zanily memorable but also genuinely terrifying. This guy is scary. I suppose when your movie’s hero is a villain (which seems to be the new trend for D.C.), then the antagonist has to be a real piece of work. McGregor makes the character special.
Rosie Perez suddenly seems to be getting wonderful parts. I loved her as Renee Montoya, a pretty sympathetic character who gets great moments of both comedy and drama. Mary Elizabeth Winstead (whom I always (bafflingly) think of as Lucy McClane, even though she’s had more memorable roles) doesn’t get to say much for quite a while, but once she’s fully in the story, she’s a very welcome presence. Ella Jay Basco (playing a character who becomes pretty important in the comics) really grew on me. I love the way we get to know and love the guarded Cassandra more as she gradually opens up and reveals her personality. And Jurnee Smollett-Bell is a huge standout as Black Canary, probably the movie’s most unequivocally virtuous character. Most of the time, we don’t necessarily notice that this film is produced, written, and directed by women, but the scene of Canary coming to Harley’s rescue in the alley seems like such a girl thing. If you’re a young woman, and you’re watching this movie hoping for instructions on how to live a virtuous life, you’ve made a bad choice because the protagonist is a deranged sociopath. But one good lesson the movie does teach clearly is that women should watch out for each other. If you see another woman being taken advantage of, always intervene.
The film is directed by Cathy Yan (the first Asian American woman to direct a superhero movie) and penned by another woman Christina Hodson (who recently got some acclaim for writing Bumblebee). As a woman, I can say the film definitely appealed to me with interesting characters who kept me engaged in the story. As a man, my husband found it similarly engaging. He’s been following some of the outrage by (a certain unpleasant subset of) male fans online with extreme amusement. Honestly if you can’t watch this movie and find the women attractive enough in their slightly less skimpy costumes revealed from slightly less male-gazey camera angles, then I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe you just don’t like the character. Maybe you need to go watch Jared Leto in a standalone Joker movie. (Actually, maybe you should petition for one. I feel bad for Jared Leto. I think he deserves more of a chance in the role.)
The story does have kind of a girl-power spin, but, I mean, it’s hardly the thing to show to the local Brownie troop. Birds of Prey more than earns its R rating, and its star is clearly a demented sociopath who (despite her endearing charms) is consistently violent to a disturbing degree. While we do get the, “I’m my own person, and I don’t need a man,” message loud and clear, the person saying that is a sociopathic Gotham City villain with no plans to reform. So it’s not like the film is sanitized or sanctimonious.
As a final note, I’d like to praise the movie’s poster. I have no idea how movie marketing works. I don’t know who designed the poster featuring Harley and the Birds of Prey floating around like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, but it looks like something by Kehinde Wiley, whose work I learned about from my daughter last year when she studied Le Roi à la Chasse for UIL art. The poster itself is fantabulous, a much more intriguing movie poster than average.)
Best Scene:
Both my husband and I loved that grocery store scene, when the kid gets advice on how to be like Harley. Turns out, Harley Quinn is more than just a Halloween costume. (She has a PhD, don’t forget!) Putting on the costume won’t make you Harley Quinn, and it won’t make you a force to be reckoned with either. You need to work hard to establish your own identity. That’s why my husband loved the scene, the content of the lecture.
I, meanwhile, loved the content of the grocery store. Movies shoot in grocery stores a lot. Some films use the aisles well, and some make them so dull. In this one, the store might as well be a carnival. In general, I liked the set design in this movie a lot, and I loved the cinematography. I kept thinking, “For a non-Oscar movie, this film has such a fantabulous look.” Then I recognized Matthew Libatique’s name in the credits, and thought, “What do I know him from?” I probably remember his name so much because he was cinematographer of last year’s A Star Is Born, another film with a (completely different) grocery store scene. He also did Black Swan, a film with a look not soon forgotten.
I also liked the scene when Harley initially runs from Renee Montoya, and I appreciated every one of McGregor’s meltdowns, when his character became vulnerable as well as scary. His eruptions of distress reminded me alternately of my four-year-old son and me (except neither of us finishes by torturing someone). McGregor is playing such an unusual guy. He really brings a lot to the character.
Best Scene Visually:
Since I spent my middle school years obsessed with Marilyn Monroe, I, of course, loved Harley’s trippy “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” hallucination. (It’s especially great because Ewan McGregor’s violence is inducing it, and Nicole Kidman covers the song in
Moulin Rouge.) It’s not just my love for Marilyn Monroe that makes me admire the moment. For one thing, this response to violence gives us yet another glimpse at how Harley’s psyche works. For another, it incorporates the Black Mask concept so well with those strange face-coverings that the men wear, reminiscent of the black net face coverings the women wear in the original song. (And there’s also kind of a dark energy to the whole thing, a bit reminiscent of Madonna’s “Material Girl” video.) There’s a lot going on in this brief moment that will require further thought and repeat viewings of the movie to unpack.
Best Action Sequence:
All the stuff on the roller skates excited me so much. For one thing, I thought, “That’s what my friends and I used to do in elementary school.” Well, a variation. “We called it skate-a-bike!” Watching brought back a lot of good, visceral memories. And then, after a moment of reflection, I thought, “Did Margot Robbie want rollerskating scenes in this so she could use the figure skating skills she learned for I, Tonya?”
I would like to add that this film is full of action, that every single action scene is fun to watch and extremely violent. So if anyone is concerned that a female director won’t include enough violent action scenes, let me put you at ease.
The Negatives:
Comic purists might be asking themselves, “Where is Batgirl?” I don’t read the Birds of Prey comics, but I do know that Barbara Gordon is supposed to lead them. I’m not sure what’s going on there. Batgirl was originally in the movie, then cut early in development. I don’t know why. I do know that this film’s writer Christina Hodson is writing the screenplay for a future Batgirl film. Maybe Barbara Gordon will join up with the team later. Think how long it took for Spider-Man to join up with the Avengers on screen!
One small (repeat) flaw I did notice in the film is that it’s never quite as funny as it wants to be. Frequently, we’d get these beats, these moments left for reactions to jokes, but nobody was really laughing. So the jokes don’t always go over as big as the movie seems to intend.
The structure is kind of all over the place, scattered, jumbled, manic. That’s intentional. Harley Quinn herself is telling us this story, and you know what she’s like! But the unusual structure of the story might not work for some people.
Also, even though leading up to the movie, there’s been a lot of grumbling from (certain) male fans suspicious about the female director, it might be women who end up complaining about the way Birds of Prey turned out. If you go looking for lessons in virtue, you’ll be disappointed. This is a film about bad guys (who happen to be female) and worse guys. Female empowerment occurs in this movie, yes, but when women get power, they don’t use it to enlighten the world. Harley herself can be just as sadistic and violent as Black Mask. It’s just that he hurts people intentionally, and with her, all is oblivious chaos.
Some audiences might be confused, too, by the fact that we seemingly have two separate sets of protagonists all crammed into the same movie. Harley Quinn is the star of this film, but she doesn’t really appear to be one of the Birds of Prey. There’s a lot of story going on here, and the movie is all over the place. That’s intentional, but things done intentionally can still be frustrating.
Overall:
Margot Robbie lights up the screen as Harley Quinn, and Ewan McGregor brings unusual complexity (and genuine menace) to villain Roman Sionis (Black Mask). Remember that these people live in Gotham City. The film is R-rated for a reason, and though the action scenes are all engaging, the casualness of some of the intense violence might disturb some people. I, personally, will watch any movie in which Robbie plays Harley Quinn, and I hope we get a Birds of Prey sequel, too.
