Or to give it its full name: ‘Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn’. Harleen Quinzel (Margot Robbie) is emancipated. However, she is dealing with the grief of separating from a long term partner as most people would do, by blowing up her Ex’s power plant, acquiring a hyena from a dog pound and feeding the creepy bloke from the dog pound to the hyena. Standard! It’s good to see the best character from Suicide Squad given her own movie, and effectively giving Suicide Squad a take two (which it probably needed).
The newly-single Harley Quinn is no longer protected by Mr J (The Joker); making it a free for all for one of Gotham’s most wanted. The film is a crazy exhibition of gratuitous violence, almost in the style of Tarantino’s Kill Bill, but instead of a sword, she is acrobatically wielding a mallet and instead of clean kills, there is a lot of maiming. Think Jackie Chan with roller skates, a mallet and a glitter gun (be right back I’m just off to write a film). Her foe’s grievances appear in comic-book style captions on the screen, including “fed brother to a hyena”, “broke driver’s legs” and “has a vagina.”
Harley Quinn is also the narrator, explaining what had happened before the film began and talking us through the various flashbacks that have led to her becoming Gotham’s most wanted. The film is fun, exciting, admittedly fairly silly, as well as being an exploration of contemporary feminist issues. The film is written by Bumblebee’s (enjoyable watch on a long flight) Christina Hodson, and you can see some of the same humour throughout. Birds of Prey is a comic book film that looks like a comic book, replacing the ‘Biff!’ and ‘Pow!’ signatures with glitter and confetti.
Like the main character, the film is a bit of a mess. The realisation from the ‘Birds of Prey’ is that there is no knight in shining armour coming to save them and they will be better off working together, combining their brains, combat skills and blatant disregard for humanity to great effect. The end fight scene is the scene it could have been in Avengers Endgame, where all the women turn up ready for battle and you think it could be a kick-ass scene, but then they have no additional impact.
The film is frenetic, kinetic and chaotic, but ultimately very enjoyable. Harley Quinn is the hectic anti-heroine, and provides the antidote to the anti-superhero film. Now that Dr Quinn has been emancipated, it looks like it could be the start of a franchise, and I can’t wait to see what she gets up to next.
ClingFilm 