After uninspired but entertaining entries like Shazam and Aquaman and dour and useless movies like Man of Steel and Joker, DC seems to have realized that for comic book movies, the path of least resistance (and, commonly, the path of better movie) is prioritizing entertainment. Pick your tone however you’d like, but you’ll get more whizz-bang for your buck if your hero/villian eschews embodying any given philosophy in favor of punching real good or whatever, especially considering The Dark Knight and the Watchmen HBO series have already pretty effectively plumbed the depths of superhero philosophy and we might as well stop trying. (Looking squarely at you, The Boys. Please stop trying.) I don’t mean to sound bitter, though I almost certainly do; I think I’m just burnt out by an awful lot of posturing superhero movies about moral responsibility with nothing of value to say, and it’s nice to see Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey getting back to the basics and consisting almost exclusively of people punching real good or whatever. Sure, it’s a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but truly, what kind of ontological sourpuss nerd would be here asking what it signifies?
The question of DC’s best movie is probably better left to a different breed of ontological sourpuss nerds, but Birds of Prey is by far its most exuberant, a figurative and occasionally literal explosion of color made by a team openly having the time of their lives. Plot points don’t always hold up under later scrutiny, or really even present scrutiny, but you won’t have long to mull them over before the movie sweeps you away. Ostensibly, Birds of Prey is about Harley Quinn, criminal psychologist turned just criminal, picking up the pieces in the wake of a nasty dumping from the Joker. This is more elevator pitch than plot, though; the movie is just as ready to be free of Jared Leto’s Joker as we all are, and within roughly fifteen minutes it drops the pretense and reveals its true purpose: providing Harley & Co. a cavalcade of setpieces to crash around in, a task it approaches with aplomb. Birds of Prey is unafraid to lean into its comic book origins, featuring frequent narration from its title character and painting the screen with neon colors and subtitles detailing Harley’s enemies’ name and potential grievances in a gag that never really stops being funny. The many fight scenes are frequent highlights, too; a few are obscured by darkness and shaky cam, but the majority we get to see are manic, bone-crunching, and quite a lot of fun. One particular sequence in a police impound lot stands par excellence alongside the Raid and John Wick films as a sterling example of the ruin you can visit upon a human body with various household objects.
Despite its clear excitement to be here, Birds of still falls Prey to many of its genre’s common pitfalls. For one, it’s overstuffed with characters; one major player introduced an hour and a half in rather astutely notes “I feel like I’ve wandered into something that isn’t really about me.” I assume this is because the audience is supposed to know these characters already: Jurnee Smollet-Bell’s character apparently has superpowers that I certainly didn’t know about but all the characters did; Ewan McGregor’s character, Black Mask, puts on a black mask, and you can feel the movie elbow your ribs and whisper into your ear “that’s Black Mask.” If you’re not up on your prereq reading, it’s easy to lose track, in part because few of these characters have many distinguishing traits beyond 1) “quips” and 2) “kicks ass,” and anyways, none of them quip quite as well or kick nearly as much ass as Harley herself.
Speaking of Harley, let’s talk about Margot Robbie, a tremendously talented actor whose numerous talents are rarely fully realized. Early career roles like Focus and Wolf of Wall Street can confine her to “hot;” later spots in Mary, Queen of Scots and Bombshell recognize her talent but not her infectious energy. Birds of Prey is possibly the first movie since her stunning work in I, Tonya to recognize just how fun she is to watch. Her Harley is magnetic, somehow pulling together wildly disparate threads into a character that’s not only coherent and plausible, but an absolute hoot to watch. Thankfully, the movie understands this, and is justly willing to sacrifice its own coherence on the altar of Harley Quinn Having A Good Time. Don’t mistake this for criticism. Every time Robbie is on screen, Birds of Prey is delightful.
The rest of the actors don’t all acquit themselves as well. Besides Robbie, Rosie Perez and Mary Elizabeth Winstead carve out some enjoyable niches as, respectively, a beleaguered police detective and a talented assassin who’s still working on her theatrics, but everybody is forced to split screen time with, by my count, six other main characters, and consequently, few are given enough breathing room to leave an impact. Ewan McGregor in particular chews the scenery like cud and with about the same productivity. But at the risk of sounding absolutely insufferable, it’s a comic book movie, where talented actors are often reduced de rigueur to rote line readings, and after I stopped trying to engage with it and let it wash over me, I was far less concerned with its quality. They’re getting their paychecks, and I can’t complain.
All in all, I think I liked Birds of Prey, but give me a week and I suspect I’ll be hard-pressed to remember much about it. It’s about as popcorny as popcorn entertainment gets, a Technicolor rat king of (admittedly very cool) names like Victor Zsasz and Huntress jumping from locale to locale to commit some crimes that we may or may not be rooting for. Maybe not an enduring formula, but also not a bad way to spend the evening.
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