DCFU - Birds of Prey

The one I was the most enthused for, and the one I was the most disappointed by, Birds of Prey is a movie I find just aggravating to watch. It was something that I hoped would be a clever, manic breath of fresh air, but it instead felt like an angsty teenage girl from Broadmeadows was trying to imitate Deadpool with her Mum’s book club.

Birds of Prey (or the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), the movie with a title so bizarre that many countries changed it, suffers from one of the worst problems in Hollywood today – not trusting the audience in the slightest. Unnecessarily over-the-top, frequently explaining its own jokes and doing incredibly dumb things that any internet troll worth their salt would write innumerable tangents about, it makes for one of the most annoying viewing experiences I’ve ever had in a theatre. And I’ve seen Fant4Stic (thankfully, this movie's not THAT bad).

I’ll give you an example. We’re panning into a scene, being introduced to Renee Montoya, and she’s speaking like an aggro 80’s cop to a confused sub-ordinate. Seems funny on its own, right? No need for explanation, right? No, said somebody, we need Harley Quinn to narrate over this to explain this directly to these 11-year olds in the audience who haven’t heard many people talk. Wait, said somebody else, isn’t this movie restricted to 17-year old’s (under American rating system)…eh, f^ck it. This movie’ll make bank.

Yeah, no it didn't.

Cathy Yan’s direction of this movie is just so annoying. Now I knew nothing about Cathy Yan before she made Birds of Prey, with her only previous movie Dead Pigs not getting a Wikipedia page until after Birds of Prey came out. I was afraid that her direction would reflect someone who lacks a ton of confidence in the film's audience, especially given the major studio pressure on top of her.

And I was right. This movie feels like a high-school essay which must make its points so clear that it veers into parody. I already mentioned the approach to humour, but there’s also the unnecessary use of obvious CGI to create a vicious dog (just paint a pink stripe on a Rottweiler, it'll convey the same insanity), the bizarre explosions of colour and silliness which just make no fundamental sense and were made to just look cool, and such an over-the-top approach to Harley Quinn’s perspective of the world that I just lose all care. Watching Harley squirt a whole bottle of burger sauce onto her tongue in a fit of sadness isn’t funny or generating pathos – it’s just kind of disgusting and stupid. And a choking hazard.

This may actually be the point of the film – imitating the over-the-top nature of Harley Quinn – but it should also just be entertaining as well. A movie like Deadpool or Fight Club may be designed as exaggerated and unrealistic, but they keep it so that the situation has a punchline and an intention in the story. Here, it’s just floundering around, practically begging for holes to be torn in it.

Having just mentioned Deadpool, this movie was clearly inspired by it with all of the comically-overblown action and frequent use of metahumour and 4th-wall breaks. But the difference is that Deadpool never meanders to make itself clear before moving onto the next joke. It moves fast enough that even if you don’t get the joke, there’s something else immediately after to catch you off guard. And unlike Birds of Prey, Deadpool actually has punchlines and a sense of trust in the audience when it points out superhero clichés – Deadpool takes 5 words (“Big CGI fight coming up!”) to do what Birds of Prey takes 50 delivered in the most boring way possible (“Lemme guess, you’re gonna start talking all about your evil plan, and then…”).

Another way this movie fails in its trust of the audience is the villain. I have no idea why people acclaimed Ewan McGregor’s performance as Black Mask in this movie, because he is just…awful. In every scene, he’s acting like a psychotic Elton John, posturing and practically yelling to the audience in the back row that he’s a bad guy, he’s pure evil, he’s going to kill everybody, etc. I honestly find his henchman Mr. Zsasz, played by Chris Messina, to be more engaging, because at least Zsasz in the comics is an inherently over-the-top character, and Messina is restraining himself a bit (thank god).

In the comics, Black Mask is not this weird nightclub owner who spends millions of dollars and sends so many men to their deaths for the goal of retrieving one small diamond (worst motive ever, write better screenplays, please). He’s a serious figure who’s genuinely intimidating and ruthless. But when I find out that the original actor playing Black Mask before Ewan in this movie was Sharlto Copley, an actor typecast as a crazy lunatic psycho, I realise that these writers know nothing about villain motivation. If they were trying to create an intimidating villain out of the guy from Oldboy who gave one of the worst villainous performances I have ever seen, then they understood nothing.

This may not be a criticism, more of an observation, but there is not a single positive male character in this movie. And there are tons of male characters, from every single villain (not one female henchman for some reason) to all of the assholes in the police department to even Harley Quinn’s landlord who betrays her to Black Mask. Probably the most positive male character in this movie is the guy who tries to kill the character of Huntress, realises she’s not dead, hides her from society for years instead of giving her to the police or a proper organisation, psychologically tortures her into becoming an assassin and sends her on her merry way.

And it’s not a Basic Instinct situation where, to quote Roger Ebert, “the heterosexual characters are equally as offensive” as the LGBTQI+ characters. The women in this movie are all determined people who simply want to do their job, and who are designed to elicit pathos from the audience.

I have to think, that since there are just so many negative male characters in the movie, if it’s possible that the movie is making a statement of some kind. The comic Birds of Prey is obviously a female-centred one, but the audience is composed of both men and women who want to see some cool fight scenes, and it would be really easy to throw in someone like Red Hood or Nightwing to balance out. If you’re making a movie harder to access for a significant part of the demographic who would want to see it…what’s the point?

Easily the best part of this movie is the fight scene in the police station. It is the only moment in the film where it justifies its R/MA-rating as necessary, with broken bones, cocaine and blood flying everywhere. The stuntwork and choreography are miles above everything else in thefilm, and it’s the only point in the film where something actually clever occurs. The other action scenes are fine – the cinematography is much better than some other action films I’ve seen – and have surprisingly high amounts of practical effects, even if the choreography is a bit lacking in actual impact.

The only other positive I have is that some of the performances are pretty good. As I already mentioned, I liked Chris Messina as Mr Zsasz, because he understood that he needed just a bit of restraint. Rosie Perez is also doing well, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead is criminally wasted in this movie, getting some of the best lines but no character development whatsoever. Margot Robbie didn’t stand out to me, and I hated Ewan McGregor’s role in this movie, as I said. And that’s really all I have to say for positives.

Pretty Good/Underutilised/Fine/Okay/Alright.

Guys, this is not a review bashing the people who made this. As scenes like the one in the police station show, Cathy Yan does have potential as a director, and some of the cast are good. It’s just that the script is so fundamentally untrusting of its audience that it becomes aggravating to watch after only a short exposure. This could have been an excellent movie with a ton of violent wit and silliness, but as it is, I’m going to give Birds of Prey a

D.

God, that was long.