She just wants breakfast. In an era where noble superheroes and dastardly villains are constantly preoccupied with saving the world or burning it down, all that initially matters to Harley Quinn—the brilliant but unstable psychiatrist, and the former squeeze of a certain lunatic called The Joker—is that she be able to chow down on a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich in peace. Naturally, Birds of Prey, the hectic and uneven and largely diverting new addition to the dreary DC Extended Universe, strews plenty of obstacles in her path, continuously delaying her date with culinary bliss. But while Harley’s mania for locally sourced McMuffins (“Maybe it’s the Armenian arm hair,” she muses) is just one of countless random flourishes in the film, it’s also symbolic of the movie’s playful tone and plucky spirit. If you want tedious footage of solemn warriors grappling with the crushing existential weight of their powers, go watch Endgame. Birds of Prey is all about fun.
The DCEU has tried this before, most recently with Shazam!, a lightweight yarn whose cheerful silliness functioned as a welcome corrective to the relentless turgidity of leaden adventures like Batman v Superman. Shazam! was pleasant enough, and it featured a wonderfully limber comic performance from Zachary Levi, but it was also decidedly unmemorable, with flat humor and tiresome fight scenes. Birds of Prey, which was directed by Cathy Yan from a screenplay by Christina Hodson (Bumblebee), is a significant improvement on both fronts. It channels its flamboyant irreverence in ways that periodically resemble actual wit. It also happens to be a surprisingly good action movie.
This is not to say it’s without its problems. Birds of Prey—whose title initially featured the cumbersome appendage, “and the fantabulous emancipation of one Harley Quinn,” though in light of sluggish box-office performance, Warner Bros. has panically rebranded it as Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey—is nominally a standalone picture, but it often feels caught in between, striving to both launch a new franchise and perpetuate an existing one. We first met Harley (Margot Robbie) in 2016’s Suicide Squad, that ill-fated blockbuster of teamed-up misfits which cast an unctuously hammy Jared Leto as The Joker. The clown has left town in Birds of Prey, which opens with Harley nursing her emotional wounds following her painful break-up with “Mister J”. Not exactly the most even-keeled moll to begin with, Harley spirals into a self-destructive bender, one that finds her shearing her trademark pink-and-blue pigtails, buying a pet hyena, breaking an ogler’s legs, and crashing a propane tanker into a chemical plant.
It’s an awkward start. To be fair, Yan possesses a fertile visual imagination—Birds of Prey is full of sudden zooms, textual overlays, and splashes of color—and in the movie’s early scenes, she uses shards of animation to convey the disintegration of Harley’s relationship with her sadistic paramour. But while that’s a nifty aesthetic touch, the decision to frame the film as the aftermath of The Joker forsaking Harley feels misguided, allowing an absent character to cast a dark shadow. And while it may be born of continuity concerns, it’s even odder for that same absence to propel the narrative; once Gotham City’s criminal element learns of Harley’s newfound singledom (and her corresponding lack of big-bad protection), she finds herself the target of ne’er-do-wells with all manner of grievance.
Which is pretty much where the fun starts, or rather where it already started. Birds of Prey deploys a nonlinear approach, regularly looping back in time as Harley’s cheeky voiceover introduces us to assorted miscreants and catches us up on various acts of barbarism. The freewheeling structure is hardly necessary, but it’s nevertheless strangely gratifying to watch a comic-book movie which exhibits genuine interest in how its story is told.
That story has roughly as much depth as most of the film’s plot and characters, which is to say, not a whole lot. There’s a MacGuffin to be found, of course: the Bertinelli Diamond, which is less valuable for its karats than for its, er, atomic structure, which apparently holds the password to a bottomless offshore banking account. (Or something.) Chief seeker of the jewel is Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), a deranged gangster with a penchant for peeling off his enemies’ faces; with Joker out of the picture (see what I mean?), Sionis—who also goes by the underwhelming moniker Black Mask—senses an opportunity to consolidate his power within Gotham’s underworld. Harley, understandably desperate to keep her own face attached to her skull, volunteers to procure the diamond for him, though it’s only a matter of time before she becomes his adversary.
As villains go, Sionis is a major miscalculation; he’s too psychopathic to take seriously, but also too grotesque to be entertaining. McGregor, who played a far more interesting heavy in the third season of Fargo, aims for snarling camp, but even he can’t rescue a baddie this banal; the sequence where Sionis humiliates a female bar patron by making her dance on a table feels bizarrely out of place, both narratively and tonally.
Still, it’s perhaps appropriate that Sionis is the film’s worst character, given that Birds of Prey is about a ragtag group of violent femmes who grudgingly collaborate to overthrow an especially toxic male. Thematically, it’s a bit schematic, the way the movie seems to stress gender at every turn; for example, there’s a runner about Harley claiming her independence that isn’t especially moving or persuasive. At the same time, the concept of a superhero-adjacent production featuring women who are neither love interests nor harpies seems downright radical. If some groaning lampshading is what it takes to see female-led and -created art at the multiplex, then so be it.
Besides, Birds of Prey is too inviting to be scolding. Through a combination of necessity and serendipity, Harley becomes the de facto leader of an all-lady quintet, the other members of which are good company, even if they’re thinly developed. They include Dinah Lance/Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), a lounge singer with a literally killer voice who pulls double duty as Sionis’ reluctant driver; Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), a disgraced detective who speaks, much to everyone else’s amusement, almost exclusively in hard-boiled ’80s-cop-movie dialogue; and Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), a pickpocket who becomes more intimately acquainted with the coveted diamond than she and her digestive tract had bargained for. Those three are pleasantly unpleasant, but the real standout is Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a crossbow-wielding avenger with a taste for blood and a habit for practicing her stilted catchphrases in front of a mirror. When Harley gushes “You are so cool!” after Huntress casually dispatches a flunky, she’s speaking for all of us.
Birds of Prey gets decent mileage out of its cast bonding and bickering. (It also trots out a predictably rambunctious girl-power soundtrack—“Barracuda,” “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” Kesha’s “Woman”, etc.—though its musical highlight comes during a dream sequence, which finds Harley cooing a Marilyn Monroe number.) Robbie, of course, is the anchor; largely discarding the nuance that she brought to the screen last year in Bombshell and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, her Harley is a gleefully bonkers id, all boisterous spunk and brash charm. Being a gifted actor, Robbie can’t help but round out her portrayal with pinches of intelligence, tenderness, and regret, but she also doesn’t let anything as irksome as emotional sophistication dampen our enjoyment of watching her raise hell.
And it is there, unexpectedly, where Birds of Prey distinguishes itself. This is only Yan’s second feature, but she instantly proves herself to be a skilled and inventive orchestrator of action. (The fight coordinator is Jon Valera, who also worked on John Wick: Parabellum.) The movie is replete with dynamic and exciting combat sequences, which nimbly balance energy with clarity. A brawl in a police evidence warehouse finds Harley brandishing her infamous baseball bat with lethal effect, while the climax—which is typically where comic-book movies die a grim and incoherent death—takes place in a cheerily demented fun house, lending brightness and eccentricity to the litany of beatdowns. There’s even a scene which finds Harley, with the help of Huntress’ motorbike, chasing her quarry on roller skates, turning roller derby into blood sport.
The overall essence of Birds of Prey—a mixture of giddiness, vivacity, and nonsense—is distilled into one of its most alacritous set pieces, which finds a bubbly Harley storming a police station with a grenade launcher. She cuts a deadly figure, but her smile is sincere rather than unhinged, and the giant rounds that she fires are filled with glitter rather than explosives. As she blithely rampages past desks and cubicles, swirls of vibrant color fill the air, and a sequence of ostensibly grisly carnage instead becomes downright painterly. It’s fitting that those dazzling confetti rounds knock Harley’s targets unconscious without permanently harming them. After all, this chaotic, impressive movie never breaks your skin. But it sure catches your eye.
Grade: B
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.