Following 'Suicide Squad,' 'Birds of Prey' Is A Breath Of Fresh Air
Starring Margot Robbie, Rosie Perez, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ewan McGregor, Chris Messina, Ali Wong, Jurnee Smollett-Bell
R
Action, Adventure
Run time: 1 hr, 49 min
Directed by Cathy Yan
In theaters February 7, 2020
I had been here before - watching a fun trailer with a solid soundtrack and looking forward to what looked like a DC superhero ensemble film. And the first time, I’d been impressively let down by the movie itself. The more I thought about it, the more I was worried Birds of Prey would become the next Suicide Squad. A film that felt like a waste of time with characters I didn’t care about and couldn’t root for and a plot that was so simplistic it was forgettable. Within five minutes of Birds of Prey, I realized that it was far more Deadpool than Suicide Squad. I could not have been more thankful.
The trailer doesn’t give away a ton about the plot - just that Harley Quinn (Robbie) is on her own after officially ending things with her beloved Mr. J (Suicide Squad’s Jared Leto, not shown at all in this film) and finds other women in a similar position in being fed up with some men, wanting to take their power back from some men and they team up to fight some men. There was a bit more to it than that. There’s a central mission involving a lost diamond and each woman (Perez, Winstead and Smollett-Bell) is on their own getting through their own quest, whether that’s vengeance, seeking answers or just trying to survive, before realizing they can accomplish a lot more together.
In Suicide Squad, I found Robbie’s portrayal of Harley Quinn to be grating and a bad fit for the movie. She managed to seem like a parody of a cartoon character - which is saying something for how over-the-top Harley often is. However, in a movie all her own, the tone can fit the character. We get to see a lot more of her personality, rather than the slivers we got in her introduction. One of my favorite aspects was how often we got proof of her intelligence. She is a doctor, after all. When her whining accent is spilling out analyses of personality disorders, you’re forced to sit up and take notice. She isn’t just a floozie on the arm of a crime boss. She’s just got her own issues that have turned her into the psychotic comic character we see on the screen. Her accent sometime still grates on me and causes some eye-rolls, but the opportunity to view her as a full person makes her more endearing in 10 minutes than any character that got screen time in Suicide Squad.
The stand out for me was Smollett-Bell, playing Black Canary. She caught my attention every moment she was on screen and any scene that showed her fighting had me on the edge of my seat. The choreography, directing and filming style of all the fight scenes is far and away one of the most impressive things about this movie. Every woman has their own style - Winstead’s Huntress is extremely calculated and polished, Smollett-Bell has more of a street style that has seemingly been honed just through practice, Perez is a bit more classic and basic and Robbie is a mixture of using the room around her as a weapon and wildly intelligent but seemingly simple choices. The plot of this movie is fine and predictable, but I’d watch a reel of these women kicking ass on repeat. For one of the first times with a DC film, I left the theater actively hoping that a sequel would be coming around the corner. Am I just rooting for Harley Quinn after actively disliking the most recent two iterations of the Joker that have come into pop culture? Maybe. But that doesn’t make me any less hopeful that this is another indication of DC’s change in tone with their previously grim and dragging movies.