Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

Birds of Prey is directed by former Wall Street Journal reporter Cathy Yan, who follows up her acclaimed indie film, Dead Pigs. The film is a spin-off from the commercially successful but critically maligned DC Extended Universe team-of-villains film, Suicide Squad, and it’s very much in keeping with the mayhem and the madness that permeated that release. “Birds of Prey” existed as property before this film, most notably in the pages of DC Comics, but also as a short-lived TV show for The WB back in 2002-03. Still, this take is very much in keeping with the DC Extended Universe vibe of colorful antics, music-video stylistics, and ultra-dynamic action sequences.

The idea for a Harley Quinn spin-off feature started back in 2016, before Suicide Squad‘s release into theaters. Harley Quinn is a popular character and Margot Robbie as an actor to portray her. The “Birds of Prey” had been slated to appear, as well as the introduction of Batgirl into the DCEU. Margot Robbie signed on to not only star but to produce. Over the next couple of years, Batgirl was removed from the film’s development to make her solo film with Joss Whedon slated to script. He left the project after struggling to come up with a workable story and was replaced in 2018 with Christina Hodson, who did some writing for the TV series, “Birds of Prey.” Hodson intends to also write for an upcoming movie featuring The Flash.

At the same time, Cathy Yan as attached to direct the spin-off Birds of Prey film with Hodson also scripting. Birds of Prey was st to include a part for Barbara Gordon, aka the original Batgirl, but the studio decided to cut her role out and save it for a later debut. In the same pocket universe, a Suicide Squad sequel led by Gavin O’Connor was also set to begin production later in the year, while Jared Leto’s Joker character would also be getting his spin-off.

Robbie, as a producer, wanted it to be an R-rated film, and it took quite a bit of convincing to make that happen. The story stems from Harley Quinn’s point of view, and her mind would not sanitize her storytelling for a PG-13 crowd. Still, given its parent film, Suicide Squad, is rated PG-13, Warner Bros. had understandable qualms. However, when Deadpool fo enormous success, it gave the project the opening to do it, if they could keep to a budget of $75 million (it came in a quite bit ahead of that amount, with estimates ranging in the $80-100 million range.)

They also looked for a woman to direct. Of the ones they interviewed, they preferred Cathy Yan’s approach best. She emphasized a strong color palette, desire for the costumes to be directly reflective of each character’s personality, and she had experience with ensemble casts. Her commitment to desire to emphasize action sequences that minimized gun violence (Harley shoots up a police station with a non-lethal firearm that shoots beanbags, smoke bombs, or glitter bombs). But more than this, she realized that the theme is of personal growth through self-confidence, of breaking the barriers in one’s mind, much like she was doing in real life in thinking she could direct, and take on a big-budget Hollywood superhero flick. Lastly, women can achieve great things if they work together instead of tearing each other apart, which is a critical element of Birds of Prey, both on the screen and behind the production.

The storyline is told from Harley Quinn’s point of view, occasionally breaking the fourth wall to reveal her thoughts and opinions. She is a very unreliable narrator, leading to a zany overall vibe. It picks up with Harley Quinn just following her dastardly dreamboat, The Joker, breaking up with her, with the spinout of their toxic relationship leaving her in shambles. An oft-unhinged club owner named Roman Sionis has secured a rare diamond worth so much that he could afford to up his protection racket operation to become the most prominent crime kingpin in Gotham City. To do his dirty work, Sionis has a bad-guy alter ego known as Black Mask. That diamond is stumbled onto and taken by a pickpocket extraordinaire named Cassandra Cain, who ends up swallowing it to avoid having to give it up when frisked by police, making her the most sought after person in the city, especially after Roman places a half-million-dollar bounty on her.

All of this leads to Harley forming a ramshackle team of women with grievances with Black Mask to put an end to his murderous ways. That team includes Huntress, aka Helena Bertinelli, a Punisher-type mafia princess-turned-vigilante who rides a motorcycle and shoots a crossbow – Black Canary, aka Dinah Lance. Leading the case for the Gotham City Police Department is Renee Montoya, played by Rosie Perez, and newcomer Ella Jay Basco portrays Cassandra Cain, who eventually becomes Batgirl in DC Comics (though now calls herself Orphan in current continuity).

This DCEU release represents the first major Hollywood superhero film directed by an Asian-American woman.  Yan became attracted to the project because of the complex nature of Harley Quinn’s personality. Quinn has a Ph.D. in Psychology with an emphasis on mental illness. Yet, she’s also a sociopath who happens to have many of those same mental illnesses she diagnoses in others, including schizophrenia. Her identity in recent years was as the girlfriend of the Joker, but not that they’ve broken up, she had a hard time trying to figure out her identity as an individual.

Female empowerment is the central theme that runs throughout the film, as Quinn encounters several other strong women who have a history of being identified with domineering men but who must find a way to grow beyond. As Harley Quinn says in the film regarding her name, “You know what a harlequin is? A harlequin’s role is to serve. It’s nothing without a master. And no one gives two sh*ts who we are beyond that.” Once she realizes that she doesn’t need a male master to have her identity, she proceeds on the road to becoming a master of her destiny.

That road is the harder one to travel down for many women who feel they need a male protector, but the women in Birds of Prey soon realize that they can have greater protection with each other. Harley meets several other women who are challenged with their anger issues at various things, whether feeling overlooked in their profession, in their families, or treated as the property of someone with power. It’s a violent world out there, so the only way to achieve control is to show they can be just as willing to go toe-to-toe with the other baddies out there trying to shut them down.

Yan and her screenwriter Christina Hodson set up many skirmishes featuring well-choreographed hand-to-hand fighting with a variety of melee weapons, crossbows, and other forms of weaponry that aren’t just guns. Except for Black Canary, these women don’t have any superpowers

To get into the head of Harley Quinn and understand why she would stay in such an abusive relationship with the Joker, Margot Robbie did research to look for traits in real-life women who remain in terrible marriages with abusers. In particular, she found many keys in the Sam Shepard play, “Fool for Love,” that helped to click in her mind.

Gotham City has a bit of a different look in mind from the typical films starring Batman, which tends to accentuate blackness and grimness, with sunlight rarely making an appearance. Gotham, as envisioned by Harley Quinn, is more sunny, vibrant, and colorful, filmed mainly in the Los Angeles region, to take advantage of the new tax incentives offered for shoots in California. It also is a bit more ground-level in scope, whereas a Batman film feels oppressive with its monolithic architectural designs and claustrophobic sets. The film also continues the aesthetic of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad with its punky, Crayola-style palette for designing makeup and costumes for its antiheroes.

The film earns its R rating beyond just letting the F-bombs flow. The violence can be brutal, with Harley Quinn employing her trademark moves to smash a bad guy with a mallet or to deliver a broken limb or two. Roman Sionis is a bit gruesome in the messages he wants to send to others, including a scene in which he hangs a few hostages upside down and orders their faces removed with a knife.

Those who choose to connect with Birds of Prey’s underlying feminist message might find more connection with the material than those who wish to see the film as a straight-up superhero narrative. There is much left to be desired, as the humor isn’t particularly funny, the personalities lack depth, and the situations tend to feel like things we’ve seen before in run-of-the-mill gangster and martial-arts action flicks.

Perhaps the best part of Birds of Prey can also be said to have been the best part of Suicide Squad, which is Margot Robbie’s inspired performance. She is the perfect Harley Quinn, wholly insane and lacking a moral backbone yet alluring, athletic, comical, and vulnerable. She is a mix of ditsy gal who walked out of a screwball comedy from the 1940s if she had with a head for psychology that allows her to readily understand the motivation of everyone around her in ways that not even they were aware. Perhaps if we could delve much more deeply into her own psychology, much in the way that Joaquin Phoenix was able to do in Joker, we would have a movie worth following.

Unfortunately for Robbie, both of the films in which she plays Harley Quinn has her sharing screen time with a plethora of characters that are far less interesting. Unlike Suicide Squad, which made people wonder how fun a Harley Quinn could be, there are no secondary roles within Birds of Prey that will make the audience clamor for an offshoot. The lack of spin-off desire may not bode well for the Batgirl solo film should they decide to use this film’s version of Cassandra Cain.

The best part of Harley Quinn as a superhero film comes in the amusement park funhouse climax, where the “Birds of Prey” must act as a team to take down the baddies using a variety of weapons and eye-popping techniques through well-choreographed martial arts moves. Unfortunately, the prior ninety minutes of screen time do little to give us a vested interest in what’s going on during these battles, relegating our interest almost exclusively to admiring the presentation rather than the individual stakes involved for these characters.

Fittingly, one would imagine, the film itself plays out like Harley Quinn herself – brash, violent, audacious, and crazy  – but also thinly defined, unfocused, cruel, in poor taste, and comical without being funny. I laughed at least two-dozen times during Deadpool, and I didn’t so much as chortle once during the entire run time of Birds of Prey, even though I recognized many attempts to be humorous. It’s not a good sign for a movie when many walking out of the theater are thinking more about getting an egg sandwich like Harley ravenously consumes than they are thinking about anything else they witness for its 107-minute run time.

Qwipster’s rating: D+

MPAA Rated: R for strong violence and language throughout, and some sexual and drug material
Run time: 109 min.

Cast: Margot Robbie, Ewan McGregor, Rosie Perez, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Messina, Ella Jay Basco, Ali Wong
Director: Cathy Yan
Screenplay: Christina Hodson