I never went into this movie thinking it was going to be good. I was surprised. It’s actually somewhat hard to remember at this point what my expectations were of this film. It was a sequel of sorts to a pretty disheartening antihero film from the DC Universe, one that’s been done better by the likes of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. Suicide Squad was supposed to be what Venom was supposed to be, these edgy rated R movies that took off the kid gloves and let us root for the baddies a little, built a team of villains up for us over the course of a few movies so that they could interact with our heroes in more interesting ways with a longer emotional runway. Instead, Suicide Squad was hard to watch and generally soulless aside from the excellent character work of Margot Robbie. It was right and proper that she should receive a spin off of her own, and Gail Simone’s work along with Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti’s zany take on Harley and Chad Hardlin’s whimsical art style have made for some excellent source material to draw from.
Birds of Prey is an above average break up movie and an excellent superhero story that really did find a way to maintain its feminist credentials without having to sacrifice fan service in many respects. It found a way to cannily navigate its way between the expectations of a young male audience who came to see a group of misfit criminals with a lot of sex appeal and the core of fans who’ve been waiting to see an all-women line-up from literally any production house since forever.
Robbie’s Harley is the ditzy femme fatale of Suicide Squad, but her look and her outlook are updated. She spends less time licking the ends of bats and doing contortions in a stripper cage and a lot more time exacting vengeance on gross people like the owner of the exotic petshop who demands “payment in kind” or befriending hapless pickpockets out of jail. Her arc is believable because the movie gives her time to grieve for the death of her abusive relationship, the cartoon portrait of Mr. J in her apartment that she throws knives at (who, significantly, her younger ward does not even recognize) or the party where she meets a cute mannequin, a cute guy who ends up being a creep, and a future guardian angel. Friend says one of the wise things the director did was not try to make her sympathetic for too much of the movie: yes, she’s cutesy, but HQ sells out the pickpocket when things get hard, she’s too drunk to fight off her captors after a night out at the bar, she bowls over an innocent store clerk for very little reason with her shopping cart. She’s a pretty big jerk, which makes her decision to defend the pickpocket toward the end all the more meaningful, because it almost-but-not-quite feels like a turning point.
The absurdist elements of the movie are some of the most refreshing scenes of the movie (more joke spoilers): HQ’s take on Marilyn Monroe is a fun house mirror for a character that is a kind of exaggerated, larger than life grunge Marilyn herself; the line about the “atomic structure” of the diamond got a laugh out loud from all of the theater; the shirt Montoya wears for an inexplicably long time in the police station; the sandwich death. The fight scenes that involve HQ incorporate an element of magical luck that makes them unexpected and whimsical and fun to watch. Friends said that the best fight scene by far was in the evidence locker with Black Betty in the background, but I would posit that it might actually be the storming of the police station just a few minutes earlier with the bean bag gun. Friend went in saying that his wish list for the movie was that there would be lots of “close quarter weird fight scenes,” and he left very satisfied. Friend says that Huntress feels like she is the “star of her own movie that we didn’t see,” which I love.
Narratively, the movie is one tightly wound skein. It doesn’t quite make it to “multiple temporalities” (think Dunkirk or Inception), as one Friend said he was being led to believe, but it does jump around in some odd ways, laterally to other characters just outside of the frame, rather than to conventional flashbacks. The effect is one in which the story feels like its filling up with more and more information and stakes the longer we go. It’s an unnecessary structural alteration, but welcome, like lace. The lack of linear storytelling is one of my favorite things about experiencing this movie for the first time.
One of my favorite evil scenes is the forced strip torture scene, which feels crafted to give every women goose pimples. It has something to do with the way that the villain asks for his victim by her first name, feels oddly intimate and specific. Not just “get on the table and dance,” but “Get on the table, Alicia, and dance.” Ugh.
Doc’s character is the one truly evil character in the whole movie and he never gets his comeuppance. It’s so distracting that it’s still a little unnerving right now to talk about. There is only one scene that is clearly batshit insane makes no sense how did this make it in and it’s toward the tail end of Harley and her runaway hiding out at her apartment. There’s a knock on the door from the stairs staying “Open Up, It’s the Police,” so the two of them run to the window to escape, only to find a thug launching a fireball of fireworks into her apartment through the window. At which point her hyena goes missing instantly (to be found later completely safe though its set up as a kind of winter sequence in the same vein as the massacred sandwich). Then they… go down the stairs they just were avoiding because of the police (remember?) only there’s no one there. There’s no one in the shop at all. And no one waiting for Harley anymore, in fact, except Doc is packing his things because he’s just been bribed (either by Huntress or the crime syndicate that Obi Won controls) to leave town after tipping them off to her home address. He leaves and then she’s on the run. How was he paid? Why does she let him leave without further confrontation? Don’t they have a history together?
Also, while we’re on the topic of shared history, why don’t Black Canary and the pickpocket have more conversations about how they’re NEIGHBORS?
Those issues are not enough to detract from how fun this movie is. I cannot recommend seeing BoP highly enough.
