Mark Reviews Movies: BIRDS OF PREY: AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 6, 2020

Just like everyone who saw Suicide Squad, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) wants to forget the Joker. That's the starting point of Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, which sees the girlfriend/sidekick of the Clown Prince of Crime dumped, distraught, and destructive—well, a bit more so than usual.

A drunk Harley decides to announce her independence from her once-beloved "Mr. J." by crashing a tanker filled with a flammable substance into a chemical factor—the one where the Joker baptized her into a life of wanton crime and amoral mayhem. The resulting devastation looks more like a fireworks show than a catastrophic health crisis in the making. The colorful spectacle might be real or just how Harley sees it in the haze of the person she has become. Either way, it doesn't matter. This is Harley's world, and everyone and everything else are just in the way.

That brings us to those eponymous Birds of Prey. As for them, this is still Harley's show. Switching the title and subtitle gives a better idea about the movie. In fact, the movie itself might have been better served by the eliminating the team referenced by the title. They don't even join forces until the climactic fight (which, on a side note, is cleverly staged within a funhouse), and even then, Harley thinks of them as a bunch of "dopey little do-gooders."

This movie is an odd bird—and not only in the ways that we might expect from a story about a maniacal villain, freed from any restraint and out to make her own imprint on the world. The screenplay by Christina Hodson gets into Harley's mind, starting with an animated prologue that tells her life story (She begins with her conception but quickly thinks to jump ahead to her childhood) and continuing with a narrative that jumps back and forth, because Harley isn't exactly of a mindset for rational, straightforward thinking. It's admirable how Hodson uses the story's structure as a reflection of the character, who is so narcissistic and inattentive that she bypasses important plot points. She wasn't involved in that part of the story, so it doesn't really matter.

The real oddity, though, is how the movie is working double duty. It's both a standalone adventure for Harley and an origin story for a team of heroes who, in the end, have nothing to do with her (This is one of the inherent problems with so-called "cinematic universes," which care so much about establishing potential future installments that they often forgo, you know, telling a story on its own terms).

Robbie and director Cathy Yan provide a devious, manic energy whenever the movie lets Harley be herself, as the sole star of this tale, and it all but disappears when the other characters appear. Hodson makes room for them, but she doesn't have time for them. They come and go with minimal development (an introduction here and a back story there) and even less personality.

To be fair to police detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) and killer-voiced songstress Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) and the crossbow-wielding Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Harley possesses enough personality for a movie and a half. She gets about three-quarters of one here, fighting the foes she forgot about as soon as she wronged them and trying to find her place in the world (To try to love again, she buys a pet hyena—and has it eat the guy who suggested sex as a form of payment). If the math on that is correct, it means that the movie isn't enough for her and that she's too much for this particular movie.

The basics of the plot have Harley, now also freed from the guarantee of protection that her relationship with the Joker granted her, being hunted down by the people she has wronged over the years. There are a lot of them, including Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), a wealthy and persnickety nightclub owner who also runs a protection racket (McGregor plays him as clearly but indefinably eccentric). When things don't go his way, he becomes abusive, torturous, and/or homicidal, and Harley has problems letting things go other people's way.

There's also a MacGuffin: a diamond that holds the key to accessing the riches of a massacred mob family. Roman wants it. Harley says, if Roman will let things slide, she can get it. Renee, making a case against Roman, is looking for it. Along with Roman's sociopathic goon Viktor Zsasz (Chris Messina), Black Canary, who works for Roman, is tasked to find it before Harley. Huntress wants Roman dead because of the precious stone, and meanwhile, the diamond is making its way through the digestive tract of teenaged pickpocket Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco).

This plot isn't overly complicated. It only seems that way because of the intentionally playful jumps in time and the inclusion of characters who are essentially an afterthought. In the process, the movie undermines its best asset. Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn frees Harley and then traps her in a web of misguided franchise-building.

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