A bright, refreshing energy runs through the new DC Comics film Birds of Prey, a rarity in comic book-based films at this point. It’s not just that director Cathy Yan has filled her film with bold colors, fantasy and animation sequences, and narrative loops. It’s also that the movie—sort of a standalone adventure for Joker sidekick Harley Quinn—shakes off the turgid, self-serious weight of most of DC’s past films.
Birds of Prey particularly makes a delightful hash of its immediate predecessor, 2016’s loathsome Suicide Squad, which introduced Margot Robbie’s take on the Harley character. That film, directed leadenly by David Ayer, was perhaps most famous for what we didn’t end up seeing much of: Jared Leto’s tortured, and torturing, read on the Joker, a much ballyhooed, then embarrassing Method stunt that had Leto reportedly mailing dead animals to his co-stars to really get into character. Many of the Joker’s scenes were ultimately cut from the film, but his dumb stink still lingered in the film; all that sweaty effort to do something edgy and subversive tainted an already plenty tainted project.
With Birds of Prey, that’s all gone, because Harley has broken up with Mr. J and is now left to her own devices. At first, she’s in mourning, unmoored and purposeless. But the journey of the movie is her finding her way to self-actualization—which, in the process, DC kinda does too. It’s a freeing movie, not without its flaws and missteps, but wonderfully alive with all the looseness of new possibility.
Credit for much of that goes to Yan, a young filmmaker who had a breakout feature, Dead Pigs, at Sundance a few years ago, and is now going toe-to-toe with many of the trusted boys of franchise filmmaking. All that youthful pluck is just what Birds of Prey needed to lift it above its turgid brethren. The exuberance does, on occasion, clutter or slightly derail the film, but that’s to be forgiven when other moments land so well.
At the center of Yan’s melee (the playful, clever script is by Christina Hodson) is Robbie, who has to strike a tricky balance. The problem of a movie like Birds of Prey, and like Suicide Squad, is that it installs a homicidal maniac as its protagonist and then, due to the conventions of big-budget filmmaking, asks that we root for them. So, is this supervillain really all that super? How wicked are they really supposed to be? Birds of Prey kind of fails in that arithmetic, as most attempts do, but Robbie nonetheless tries her damndest to get the calculus right.
Think of her New Yawk-ish accent in the movie as representative of her whole performance. At first it sounds all wrong, unevenly applied and too cartoonish. But by the end of the movie, you’ve gotten used to it, even endeared. That’s what Robbie does with Harley on the whole, either reshaping her performance as she goes or just plugging away until she’s worn us down. She vacillates between sad and petulant quite well, and pulls off Yan’s many thunking, cracking fight sequences with aplomb.
There’s a righteous vengeance in all that pummeling, as Harley and her new friends exact reprisal on all the bad men who would seek to crush them. That unsubtle spirit of empowerment mostly plays well. All the violence is proportionate to the outsized stakes of the world in which this story takes place; Yan is careful to delineate that this is not exactly our universe, where breaking someone’s legs is rarely the solution to anything. Helping to justify all that murder and mayhem is a perfectly odious villain played by Ewan McGregor: Roman Sionis, the sadistic scion of a wealthy family. He’s just the right target for all this outrage, entitled and cruel and frustratingly omnipotent. (Until, of course, he isn’t.)
Joining Harley in her fight are the titular birds, Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell, giving good kick), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, same), and Renee Montoya, who is played by Rosie Perez. I absolutely adore that this is a movie that gives Rosie Perez this kind of opportunity, and potentially lays the groundwork for more. Birds of Prey is rife with “heck, yeah!” things like that, little triumphs that are all the more exciting because you didn’t quite know you were waiting for them to finally happen until they do.
The movie perhaps has to be a little sloppy, a little erratic, to include all that cheer-worthy stuff. Yan can sometimes get ahead of herself, rushing into something new—a tonal shift, a plot twist, a character turn—before we’ve had a chance to really process and adjust. But I get why she and Hodson and their cast are so eager. It’s a cool thing they get to do, breathing life into perhaps the most moribund corner of DC’s current cinematic universe. Wonder Woman has all her mythic flair, and Aquaman has his grand fantasy. Harley and the Birds get something different. Theirs is a contemporary verve that offers a glimpse of something heartening: a future in which all kinds of people get to tell these stories, and we’re all the better off for it.
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