An R rating allows the Australian actress to really hit a new stride as her crazy attitude is ever-present and a new fourth-wall breaking style a la Deadpool helps tell the story. Robbie, for the most part, is better than ever in the part. Birds of Prey is rife with “heck, yeah!” things like that, little triumphs that are all the more exciting because you didn’t quite know you were waiting for them to finally happen until they do.Margot Robbie clocks in again as Harley Quinn, the centerpiece of the film, despite her comrades getting top billing in the first three words of the title.
#BIRDS OF PREY REVIEW MOVIE#
I absolutely adore that this is a movie that gives Rosie Perez this kind of opportunity, and potentially lays the groundwork for more. Joining Harley in her fight are the titular birds, Black Canary ( Jurnee Smollett-Bell, giving good kick), Huntress ( Mary Elizabeth Winstead, same), and Renee Montoya, who is played by Rosie Perez. He’s just the right target for all this outrage, entitled and cruel and frustratingly omnipotent. Helping to justify all that murder and mayhem is a perfectly odious villain played by Ewan McGregor: Roman Sionis, the sadistic scion of a wealthy family. All the violence is proportionate to the outsized stakes of the world in which this story takes place Yan is careful to delineate that this is not exactly our universe, where breaking someone’s legs is rarely the solution to anything. That unsubtle spirit of empowerment mostly plays well. There’s a righteous vengeance in all that pummeling, as Harley and her new friends exact reprisal on all the bad men who would seek to crush them. She vacillates between sad and petulant quite well, and pulls off Yan’s many thunking, cracking fight sequences with aplomb. That’s what Robbie does with Harley on the whole, either reshaping her performance as she goes or just plugging away until she’s worn us down.
But by the end of the movie, you’ve gotten used to it, even endeared. At first it sounds all wrong, unevenly applied and too cartoonish. Think of her New Yawk-ish accent in the movie as representative of her whole performance.
So, is this supervillain really all that super? How wicked are they really supposed to be? Birds of Prey kind of fails in that arithmetic, as most attempts do, but Robbie nonetheless tries her damndest to get the calculus right. The problem of a movie like Birds of Prey, and like Suicide Squad, is that it installs a homicidal maniac as its protagonist and then, due to the conventions of big-budget filmmaking, asks that we root for them. It’s a freeing movie, not without its flaws and missteps, but wonderfully alive with all the looseness of new possibility.Īt the center of Yan’s melee (the playful, clever script is by Christina Hodson) is Robbie, who has to strike a tricky balance. But the journey of the movie is her finding her way to self-actualization-which, in the process, DC kinda does too. At first, she’s in mourning, unmoored and purposeless. With Birds of Prey, that’s all gone, because Harley has broken up with Mr. Many of the Joker’s scenes were ultimately cut from the film, but his dumb stink still lingered in the film all that sweaty effort to do something edgy and subversive tainted an already plenty tainted project. That film, directed leadenly by David Ayer, was perhaps most famous for what we didn’t end up seeing much of: Jared Leto’s tortured, and torturing, read on the Joker, a much ballyhooed, then embarrassing Method stunt that had Leto reportedly mailing dead animals to his co-stars to really get into character. It’s also that the movie-sort of a standalone adventure for Joker sidekick Harley Quinn-shakes off the turgid, self-serious weight of most of DC’s past films.īirds of Prey particularly makes a delightful hash of its immediate predecessor, 2016’s loathsome Suicide Squad, which introduced Margot Robbie’s take on the Harley character. It’s not just that director Cathy Yan has filled her film with bold colors, fantasy and animation sequences, and narrative loops. A bright, refreshing energy runs through the new DC Comics film Birds of Prey, a rarity in comic book-based films at this point.
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