A review of the utterly over-the-top movie “Birds Of Prey”
Thought that films about comic book characters were all man-made? Well, here in the DC comic universe, we have a movie with women as producer (Margot Robbie), writer (Christina Hodson) and director (Cathy Yan) in which the girls also fill the main role of Harley Quinn (Robbie again) and the three eponymous birds (Mary Elizabeth Winstead as The Huntress, Jurnee Smollet-Bell as Black Canary, and Rosie Perez as a tough cop).
Indeed the one leading role for a man (Ewan McGregor as the villain Roman Sionis) does not really work and essentially all the men in the movie are there to be smashed up by the women. It’s an absolute riot, utterly over the top, with minimal plot, maximum (comic book style) violence, and an extensive and thunderous soundtrack.
Effectively this film is a spin-off from “Suicide Squad”. The best thing about that earlier movie was Margot Robbie who played Harley Quinn, formerly prison psychiatrist Dr Harleen Quinzel who fell in love with a patient the Joker, and the full title of this work is “Birds Of Prey (And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn)” so now Quinn is front and centre and Robbie is such a delight in this much-expanded performance.
But it would have been a better film if she could have been teamed with the birds earlier in the fractured narrative and if the plot made any kind of sense. This polar opposite to an art house film will not be for everyone but it is entertainingly escapist in the silliest of ways.