Birds of Prey * (2020, Margot Robbie, Rosie Perez, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ewan McGregor) – Movie Review

Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn has been hastily renamed Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, in hope that the clearer title will mean healthier box office and will boost search engine optimisation after its disappointing US opening weekend gross of $33.3 million. A quick fix, then, but Birds of Prey fans soon mocked the title change on Twitter.

So, Birds of Prey gets new title after disappointing box office. Solution is simple. Make it much more fun, make it actually funny, dump the foul language and make it way less nasty and violent.

Whatever the title, Margot Robbie re-creates her role as Harley Quinn for the first time since the 2016 DC film Suicide Squad. There’s is plenty of deserved excitement surrounding Robbie’s portrayal of Harley Quinn – she it exuberantly and infectiously exciting – but understandably much less love for the movie, a foul-mouthed, violent, bad-mood, bad-karma kind of thing. They’ve turned it into a raging raw and raucous romp.

It is not a nice movie to have around. The villain, evil crime lord Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), gleefully has his nasty henchman Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina) cut the faces of three strung-up, up-side down victims in turn, a scene seen in the advertising. Censorship is bad, of course, but if it was good, the censor could start by cutting this entire sequence out of the movie, along with a few others of gratuitous strong violence where the heroine guns down or injures or kills swathes of folk. How high is the body count in the movie? Well, it’s high, unpleasantly high.

Talking Ewan McGregor, he’s no good at all as the villain, trying to play it camp, which apparently isn’t in the McGregor repertoire, and feels vaguely homophobic. He’s miscast, and he misjudges it. He makes an unbelievable American crime lord. The other performances aren’t good either, Rosie Perez’s cop Renee Montoya, Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Helena Bertinelli / The Huntress and Jurnee Smollett-Bell’s Dinah Lance / Black Canary are all abrasive and charmless, and no fun at all.

The performance of the 13-year-old Korean-Filipino actress Ella Jay Basco as Cassandra Cain (aka Batgirl), who must be protected from the evil Black Mask by Harley Quinn and her new girl gang, is a major irritant, and Robbie’s screen chemistry with Basco, or with any other of her co-stars, is hard to detect. Birds of Prey is a one-man show, or rather, sorry, one-woman show, and Robbie is up for it, in a tour-de-force, but it isn’t enough. Everything around her crumbles and collapses.

Christina Hodson’s would-be smart screenplay is muddled and messy, with annoying flashbacks, and not nearly as clever as it needs to be to pull off a twisted comic book movie. How many times are they going to mention the Joker, who has dumped Ms Quinn, turning her psychotic, a process started with her abuse in convent and school, and at the hands of various awful men. OK, we get it, she’s a man hater. But we’d like her more if she toned it down, dialled it down a notch of two. The men in the movie are of course all awful, despicable pieces of work, who deserve to die, and the women, despite their evident psychotic flaws, all heroines, or superheroines. Where is the moral centre of this movie? Who is the good guy? Harley Quinn, really?

The production is flashy but it looks as cheap as it is cheerless, so it is a slight surprise that the film cost $84,500,000, but probably that’s low cost nowadays.

Robbie is next set to appear in James Gunn’s Suicide Squad sequel.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Movie Review

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