Birds of Prey (2020)

Like its title, “Birds of Prey: And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn” (2020) was too quirky. And that made me sad, because I like quirky. I love the “Borderlands” videogames because of the pop-culture references that aren’t contextually relevant. I love “Kung Pow” (2001) because it’s stupid. I love “Deadpool” (2016) because Ryan Reynolds just played himself in a red jumpsuit.

But here, it went too far. Harley Quinn (Margo Robbie) was the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but with psychotic, murderous tendencies.

If you didn’t already know: Harley Quinn is the nom de plume of Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel, an ex-psychotherapist at the Arkham Asylum in Gotham City. She had been assigned to evaluate the Joker, but fell in love with him instead, the same way real-life women inexplicably fell in love with Charles Manson while he was in prison. Quinn helped the Joker break out of the asylum and then assisted in his shenanigans through the years. In comic books, Joker’s antics were cartoonish and never showed terminal harm, while recent live-action iterations of the Joker proved to be far more deadly, and thus Quinn’s involvement meant she was complicit in some pretty impressive manslaughter cases.
Her initial appearance was in the Batman cartoons in 1992, then added to the Batman comics in 1993, though she didn’t appear on the big screen until the much-maligned “Suicide Squad” (2016).

So. Here we are in 2020. The Joker dumped Harley Quinn for purely plot-specific reasons, giving Warner Brothers the excuse to rationalize the existence of this movie. Quinn was on her own, out on the streets of Gotham, being slowly and very ineffectively targeted by all of the criminals she’d wronged over the years who only stayed away due to her proximity to the Joker; being single put a giant target on her head.
Except that things kept working out for her. In one scene, three different men wanted to kill her, and a series of “spontaneous” events resulted in them killing each other while she escaped unharmed.
That’s acceptable, as Bond movies have had plot conveniences like that too, but here it happened multiple times.
Domino got away with it in “Deadpool 2” (2018) because her superpower was explicitly stated to be “luck.” Quinn doesn’t get that same pass here – she didn’t have superpowers; she’s just a woman in makeup with a penchant for guns.

Now about that ‘quirky’ thing: The narrative style of the movie itself had a few fun quirks, which is fine and I’ll get to those, but by-and-large, the biggest problems came with various characters, during their reveals or actions. It’s like the writers took the concept of ‘quirky’ and confused it for ‘random’ and then somehow used it as a license to add whatever they wanted with minimal context.
During one fight scene, Quinn was wearing high heels. Then there was a cut and she was wearing rollerskates. How quirky! Another character even stated “when did she have time to change?!”
Yeah. Good question.
Was that a trope from the comics/show? Did Quinn have a tendency to spontaneously change outfits or accessories to exactly what the scene needed?
If so, that ‘ability’ needed to get established much earlier in the film. It would have been as easy as Quinn ‘magically’ changing jackets at the beginning and then conveniently having a better purse somewhere in the middle. Nothing big, not even something that needed to get called out, but dropping in a spontaneous wardrobe change simply didn’t make sense, but it happened because she’s quirky.

We were introduced to Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett). When first shown, she was a singer in a bar, where hit a high-note and shattered a martini glass. Cool trick, not a superpower.
In the climactic battle, she screamed a sonic blast at a group of badguys that knocked them backwards.
How? Where was the establishment for that? How did she suddenly know she could do such a thing without so much as casually mentioning it to any of the other characters?
I’m sure that’s Black Canary’s power in the comics, but because Black Canary is even less important to the overall comic scene than Harley Quinn, there’s no acceptable reason to believe the audience at large would know of such an ability.

Then we had the villain: Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor). He was introduced almost immediately as the man behind the mask of the psychotically-violent “Black Mask,” but we didn’t see him wearing said mask until the final scene, which, at that point, why do it at all? We saw him commit crimes with his face uncovered, so why waste any time showing him with a mask?
And then he died. Just gone. His death was barely built up, and the actual execution (heh) was incredibly anticlimactic. There was zero catharsis to watching his demise, and it only served to give a potential sequel the option to have a different villain.

Police Officer Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) was a down-on-her-luck cop who kept getting the short end of the stick in her career while always having the edge to solve a case. Somehow, despite being one of the three (four?) characters that made up the Birds of Prey, she felt like an afterthought. I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow she was added late in the writing process when someone realized they needed just one more character to cram in there. Despite being integral to the story, she felt so very shoehorned in.
And because she needed something quirky too: at one point she had to change her outfit, which had been covered in trash and waste. She took some clothes from the evidence locker and came out with a shirt that said “I shaved my balls for this?” written in big red letters across the front. How quirky! Then the police captain told her it wasn’t an appropriate shirt to wear at work, because obviously it wasn’t and there’s no way any cop in their right mind would voluntarily pick that to wear.

Even the henchmen were quirky. When Sionis “raised an army” of goons to kill Quinn, they all wore creative masks that would have been more at home in a Mardi Gras parade than a death squad. When the goons tried to assault the Birds of Prey, they had guns, yet lost the fight to the four-woman squad, because of course they did.

Oh, you don’t know who the Birds of Prey are? That’s fine. Neither did I.
The movie was 100 minutes long and the Birds of Prey were still unnamed and only vaguely identified well past the 75-minute mark.

At one point, Quinn invaded a police station and shot at the cops with non-lethal bean-bags and shells full of glitter. But at such close range, everything she shot would have been lethal; there should have been a trail of dead bodies behind her and that stupid gun.

And Quinn bought herself a pet hyena, because she’s quirky.
And named it Bruce, after Bruce Wayne, because she’s quirky.
And then she at cereal while watching cartoons, because she’s quirky!
Get it? Quirky!

Ugh. It was too much.
She was exhaustively random in a way that slowly chipped away at any character and story-telling cohesion, because at any point, anything could go wrong and Quinn could just solve her way out of the problem at hand through the magic of plot contrivance, regardless of the magnitude of the issue.

This movie did a good job with character introductions. Whenever a new character entered the scene, there was a freezeframe and text scribble, detailing who the person was and what Quinn did to them, as most ‘new’ characters had a beef with Quinn and were after her for revenge. It’s not a novel concept, per se, as “Borderlands” does something similar for any character of value, so it’s rare enough that I enjoyed seeing it on the screen. The constant, brightly-colored character info was one of two quirky things I actually appreciated in this.
The other was the non-linear story-telling as Quinn narrated the events to the audience.

The music was acceptable. It didn’t stand out but it wasn’t terrible either. I think there was a rendition of “Hit me with your best shot” in there, and there may have been a version of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” but I’m not sure. Everything was a cover and some of them were hard to recognize.

For reasons known only to the gremlins in the render farms in California, the CGI in this was unacceptably bad. In one scene, Quinn walked into an abandoned theme park at night, and it was very clearly her walking on a green-screen.
Why? Why was that so obvious, Warner Brothers? You have billions of dollars at your disposal to render something pretty, and yet you didn’t!

This was one of those “root for the anti-hero” movies. There’s nothing wrong with anti-heroes as a concept – I thoroughly enjoyed “Mad Men” (2007-2014) and most of “Breaking Bad” (2008-2013); the issue isn’t with a not-good person being the focus. Instead, there’s a weird trend in comic-book movies where the studios want to drain every last drop from the franchise, which means they want to makes movies about everyone, including the villains, but it’s hard to root for a badguy unless they have redeeming qualities, so we get things like “Venom” (2018) and now “Birds of Prey,” where the badguy we’re rooting for has some weird inkling of “goodness” in them, as if that somehow covers the absolutely horrifying backstory they had wherein they killed countless people. That also means that the badguys that the anti-hero is facing off against has an even worse background.
At least in “Dexter” (2006-2013), he was a serial killer who only killed explicitly-bad people, so there was some vigilante justice we could get behind.

This current “anti-hero” comic trend would be on par with a movie about a man who skins puppies, hunting down pedophiles and skinning them alive.
Would it make the world a better place?
Maybe, I guess?
Do I want to get invested in any of those characters?
Absolutely not.

But ultimately, here’s the biggest problem I had with the movie: it required far too much knowledge of the Batman media universe. Sure, I skipped “Suicide Squad” thanks to horrible ratings, so maybe there were kernels of knowledge there that I missed, but as this was a soft-reboot/sequel (requel?), it meant things needed to get re-explained to the audience. Quinn is not like Batman or Superman or Spiderman, where you can tell a story and skip over most of their development and background and jump right into a movie because everyone dead and alive knows their tales; she doesn’t have that kind of broad cultural familiarity.

Imagine if “Doctor Strange” (2016) just started. No context, no origin story, no setup. Just Steven Strange twirling his fingers and making portals to weird places. That would be a trash movie, because the audiences would be dropped into a 3rd-tier character story with zero context for who that person is or why they could do those things or why we’re even watching them.
That’s what happened with everyone here. The only character who got a vaguely-reasonable backstory explanation was Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and she was stuck somewhere between “bit part” and “supporting character.”
The movie did start out with an animated backstory that explained how Dr. Quinzel became Quinn, but that didn’t excuse the movie for her other antics.

Final gripe: the movie was narrated by Quinn. Fine. I’m okay narration.
Then Quinn would arbitrarily look and talk at the camera, blatantly breaking the 4th wall.
Was that another trope of Quinn from the wider media? Was WB trying to copy the bits from the Deadpool franchise that audiences really liked?
I have no idea. None of those things were clear, and it all just happened.

Between an overload of quirky, some very jarring tone shifts, and only barely enough coherency to finagle a plot into existence, this movie earned itself a 2-Claw rating.
I saw it from my couch, but I would have rather saved it for a plane.
If they toned down the quirk, or explained the characters better, I would have been far more okay with it.