I'm generally of the opinion that DC's superhero movies are more interesting than Marvel. Unlike Marvel, which offers a uniform standard of quality, you never know what you're going to get when you walk into a DC movie. With DC, every film is a gamble, and Birds of Prey is a losing hand. It's
The film is a spinoff of 2016's Suicide Squad, focusing on Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the psychiatrist turned psycho killer. Harley is usually known as the Joker's partner in crime, but as the film's obnoxiously long subtitle suggests, she's out of the shadow of her famous beau for this outing. The film opens with a cutesy animated segment where Harley recaps her life up until her unceremonious breakup with the Joker. Harley's narration continues throughout the movie, so you'd better hope you like or at least tolerate her exaggerated New Yorker accent.
In the wake of her nasty breakup, Harley goes through the stereotypical motions: crying, binge drinking, partying, eating junk food, cutting her hair, buying a pet hyena, and so on. The film lurches around with lots of time skips and flashbacks as Harley narrates her scattershot recollection of events but eventually gets around to the point. Since she's no longer under the protection of her powerful boyfriend, Harley is now the target of a large number of criminals looking to get revenge for the myriad ways she's screwed people over. There's even a handy freeze-frame whenever a new character is introduced, complete with the person's name and their grievance against Harley.
In particular, she finds herself in the crosshairs of Roman Sionis (Ewan MacGregor) and Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina), a prominent Gotham crime boss and his sadistic henchman. The two men are somewhat offensively coded as gay, like something out of a dated 90s thriller. More importantly, they want Harley dead for numerous reasons. Sionis also wants to get ahold of a diamond, one etched with the codes to a deceased crime family's Swiss bank accounts. In exchange for sparing her life, Sionis sends Harley to fetch the diamond, which has been stolen (and swallowed) by a young pickpocket, Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco). However, Harley has a change of heart once she apprehends Cain, and decides to protect her new friend from Sionis and his hordes of hired goons.
In comparison to its predecessor, Birds of Prey is mostly a step up. Whereas Suicide Squad was hastily retrofitted into a jokey affair after the success of Deadpool, this film's sense of humor feels more fleshed out. Of course, if you don't care for the cheeky narration and gruesome slapstick of the Deadpool movies, you won't get a lot out of Birds of Prey. Unfortunately, like Suicide Squad, the story here is equally messy. The aforementioned diamond-retrieving plot, the eventual focus of the film, doesn't come into play until roughly halfway through the film. The preceding half is dedicated to helter-skelter character introductions and a ricocheting series of flashbacks time jumps. It's not a difficult movie to follow, but the leaps in time deflate a lot of the momentum the film has going for it.
This certainly isn't the worst film DC has produced so far since embarking on its mission to create a cinematic universe similar to Marvel, but it's not a success. Like last year's Joker, this movie struggles because it focuses on a character who normally serves only a supporting role. Harley just isn't that compelling of a character in the absence of Batman, the Joker, or even her gal-pal, Poison Ivy. The closest she comes to camaraderie in this is her big sister/little sister relationship with Cain, but the duo doesn't have the necessary chemistry to pull that off. And if it seems like I've neglected to mention the titular Birds of Prey, that's because they barely figure into the film. The Birds feel like an afterthought, extra characters that were thrown in to flesh out an otherwise scant solo vehicle for Harley Quinn. Robbie is at least fully committed to the role of Harley Quinn, but the character itself just isn't that compelling.
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