Margot Robbie's "Birds Of Prey" (DC) Official Thread
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‘Birds of Prey’: Film Review
Margot Robbie's devil-doll Harley Quinn rules the way she did in 'Suicide Squad' in a punk feminist superheroine action thriller that's thin but lively.
By OWEN GLEIBERMAN
On the scale of damage that a devil-doll superheroine can cause, breaking a man’s legs doesn’t sound all that extreme. Yet when Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the vengeful sister-of-mayhem in “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn),” breaks legs, she does it with a certain hellbent je ne sais quoi. It first happens at the nightclub owned by Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), a Gotham City crime lord, where Harley, having recently broken up with the Joker, is letting loose (not that she has any particularly more restrained mode), testing out her new identity as an unhinged singleton. Roman’s driver tries to lure her into some vicious flirtation by calling her “dumb” and a “slut,” and as anyone who knows Harley knows all too well, it’s the dumb part that really stings. So she leaps from a stage, crashing down onto his outstretched legs. Bam!! That’s not just a violent counterattack, it’s a 21st-century feminist statement.
In “Birds of Prey,” Harley Quinn is a screw-loose avenger who suggests Uma Thurman in the “Kill Bill” films crossed with Ryan Reynolds in “Deadpool,” with a nod to Juliette Lewis in “Natural Born Killers” delivering that opening diner ass-thrashing to the sounds of L7’s “shytlist.” Harley’s rock ‘n’ roll action moves are fast, loose, and out of control, whether she’s snapping limbs between bullet-time flips or charging through a police station blasting a gun that leaves the men around her collapsed in piles of multi-colored glitter.
But Harley’s mind, too, never stops racing. A former psychiatrist who tumbled through a cracked looking glass when she fell for the Joker (one of her patients) and joined him in the underworld, she’s a glittering head case who look like a demented punk cheerleader and appears, against all odds, to be in full control of her ongoing mental breakdown. Early on, she gets closure on her fizzled relationship with the Joker by sending an oil truck speeding into a giant chemical refinery and blowing it sky high. (It beats therapy.) Harley talks like a gum-snapping Brooklyn kewpie doll out of a ’40s studio comedy, and it’s part of her possessed quality that she can size up someone’s psychological profile in a rapid-fire heartbeat, spewing the kind of analysis that people pay good money to hear. Her battiness contains rationality. Her face, as much of an emblem as the Joker’s, is a pure fusion of glee and rage, the two melted into a mask of sick fun.
The inspired spark of Margot Robbie’s performance is that she plays Harley as a party girl who is also a total freak — the ringleader of her own playground. With her platinum-blonde hair split into tinted pigtails (one pink and one blue), her pasty face bedecked with tattoos of a small black heart and the word “ROTTEN,” and that light-up-the-room-with-insanity grin, she’s a psycho siren who teeters between vengeance and valor, transforming one into the other.
Harley, who made her first appearance in DC Comics in 1992, was obviously the best thing about “Suicide Squad,” the ramshackle smash of a 2016 DC movie caper. So there was every reason to hope that building an entire movie around her would pay off in a big way. “Birds of Prey” is a superhero-team origin story that tracks how Harley, mostly through sheer happenstance, comes together with a collection of misfits to form a motley crew of kick-ass superheroines. As a movie, it’s thin, lively, loud, brash, diverting, and forgettable. If anything, it’s a tighter film than “Suicide Squad,” but it’s been directed, by Cathy Yan (“Dead Pigs”), with the same sort of in-your-face slapdash aesthetic, ramping up the comics into cheeky overdrive. Harley outshone her hellion comrades before, and she does the same thing here — though Mary Elizabeth Winstead, as the crossbow-wielding Huntress, has a fierce, cool, sizing-you-up implacability that’s potent enough to be spinoff-ready.
“Birds of Prey” is the eighth film in the DC Extended Universe, as well as the first to be rated R, and coming after the stand-alone phenomenon of “Joker,” it’s a comic-book movie that isn’t pretending, in a single moment, to cast a spell of poetic awe. Yet it’s still a compellingly novel popcorn jamboree. “Wonder Woman” and “Captain Marvel” were female-superhero movies that offered the empowerment of earnest fantasy. “Birds of Prey” offers the empowerment of utter irresponsibility. The women in this movie look badder than those previous heroines did because, for the most part, they just don’t give a f—k. With any luck, that should all translate into a major hit.
Harley, as Robbie plays her, lives for the moment — she’s at her most ecstatic watching her local bodega chef cook her up an egg sandwich. But after all the mischief she caused with the Joker, she’s in the crosshairs of the police, in particular Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), who is played as a character out of a bad ’80s cop movie (that’s literally the film’s joke about her). Then Roman, a.k.a. the supervillain Black Mask, puts the screws on Harley by giving her until midnight to retrieve a large diamond from Roman’s henchwoman, Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), who has double-crossed him by stealing it — and swallowing it. McGregor plays Roman as a pretentious art fop who, between his Botox injections, like to slice other people’s faces off. He has an art collection of masks and shrunken heads that link up with this particular sadistic fetish, and McGregor makes him less a grand gangster than a life-size deviant slime.
The script, by Christina Hodson (“Bumblebee”), has attitude to spare, but in a rather bare-bones way. It’s going for the sparky nihilist defiance of “Deadpool,” with a running fourth-wall-breaking commentary by Harley, and there are cheeky character IDs ripping across the screen, as when Harley discovers herself under attack by the driver behind her, identified as “Some Frida Kahlo-looking a$$hole” (which she indeed is). But if the film’s (black) heart is in the right acid place, “Birds of Prey” could have used more of the intricate cleverness of “Deadpool.” The actresses who come together to form Harley’s posse, like Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Roman’s nightclub chanteuse Black Canary or Ella Jay Basco as the wily Cassandra, have presence to spare, but you wish they’d been given more to do.
Directing her first studio feature, Cathy Yan keeps it all hurtling along with impeccable ferocity. Her action scenes have a deftly detonating visual spaciousness, capped by crowd-pleasing moments like the one where Harley, brandishing a baseball bat, ricochets it off the floor with perfect slow-mo timing. And Yan sprinkles just the right songs (“I Hate Myself For Loving You,” an update of Ram Jam’s 1977 version of “Black Betty,” “Barracuda”) throughout what feels like a music-video comic-book jamboree, though one that effectively taps into undercurrents of feminine rage. If there’s a subversive element to “Birds of Prey,” it’s that Harley is a social deviant who was once a respectable professional woman. That she went over the edge, and lived to tell the tale, indicates how much more there is to the current moment of empowerment than the mere dream of successfully fitting in.
‘Birds of Prey’: Film Review
Margot Robbie's devil-doll Harley Quinn rules the way she did in 'Suicide Squad' in a punk feminist superheroine action thriller that's thin but lively.
By OWEN GLEIBERMAN
On the scale of damage that a devil-doll superheroine can cause, breaking a man’s legs doesn’t sound all that extreme. Yet when Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the vengeful sister-of-mayhem in “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn),” breaks legs, she does it with a certain hellbent je ne sais quoi. It first happens at the nightclub owned by Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), a Gotham City crime lord, where Harley, having recently broken up with the Joker, is letting loose (not that she has any particularly more restrained mode), testing out her new identity as an unhinged singleton. Roman’s driver tries to lure her into some vicious flirtation by calling her “dumb” and a “slut,” and as anyone who knows Harley knows all too well, it’s the dumb part that really stings. So she leaps from a stage, crashing down onto his outstretched legs. Bam!! That’s not just a violent counterattack, it’s a 21st-century feminist statement.
In “Birds of Prey,” Harley Quinn is a screw-loose avenger who suggests Uma Thurman in the “Kill Bill” films crossed with Ryan Reynolds in “Deadpool,” with a nod to Juliette Lewis in “Natural Born Killers” delivering that opening diner ass-thrashing to the sounds of L7’s “shytlist.” Harley’s rock ‘n’ roll action moves are fast, loose, and out of control, whether she’s snapping limbs between bullet-time flips or charging through a police station blasting a gun that leaves the men around her collapsed in piles of multi-colored glitter.
But Harley’s mind, too, never stops racing. A former psychiatrist who tumbled through a cracked looking glass when she fell for the Joker (one of her patients) and joined him in the underworld, she’s a glittering head case who look like a demented punk cheerleader and appears, against all odds, to be in full control of her ongoing mental breakdown. Early on, she gets closure on her fizzled relationship with the Joker by sending an oil truck speeding into a giant chemical refinery and blowing it sky high. (It beats therapy.) Harley talks like a gum-snapping Brooklyn kewpie doll out of a ’40s studio comedy, and it’s part of her possessed quality that she can size up someone’s psychological profile in a rapid-fire heartbeat, spewing the kind of analysis that people pay good money to hear. Her battiness contains rationality. Her face, as much of an emblem as the Joker’s, is a pure fusion of glee and rage, the two melted into a mask of sick fun.
The inspired spark of Margot Robbie’s performance is that she plays Harley as a party girl who is also a total freak — the ringleader of her own playground. With her platinum-blonde hair split into tinted pigtails (one pink and one blue), her pasty face bedecked with tattoos of a small black heart and the word “ROTTEN,” and that light-up-the-room-with-insanity grin, she’s a psycho siren who teeters between vengeance and valor, transforming one into the other.
Harley, who made her first appearance in DC Comics in 1992, was obviously the best thing about “Suicide Squad,” the ramshackle smash of a 2016 DC movie caper. So there was every reason to hope that building an entire movie around her would pay off in a big way. “Birds of Prey” is a superhero-team origin story that tracks how Harley, mostly through sheer happenstance, comes together with a collection of misfits to form a motley crew of kick-ass superheroines. As a movie, it’s thin, lively, loud, brash, diverting, and forgettable. If anything, it’s a tighter film than “Suicide Squad,” but it’s been directed, by Cathy Yan (“Dead Pigs”), with the same sort of in-your-face slapdash aesthetic, ramping up the comics into cheeky overdrive. Harley outshone her hellion comrades before, and she does the same thing here — though Mary Elizabeth Winstead, as the crossbow-wielding Huntress, has a fierce, cool, sizing-you-up implacability that’s potent enough to be spinoff-ready.
“Birds of Prey” is the eighth film in the DC Extended Universe, as well as the first to be rated R, and coming after the stand-alone phenomenon of “Joker,” it’s a comic-book movie that isn’t pretending, in a single moment, to cast a spell of poetic awe. Yet it’s still a compellingly novel popcorn jamboree. “Wonder Woman” and “Captain Marvel” were female-superhero movies that offered the empowerment of earnest fantasy. “Birds of Prey” offers the empowerment of utter irresponsibility. The women in this movie look badder than those previous heroines did because, for the most part, they just don’t give a f—k. With any luck, that should all translate into a major hit.
Harley, as Robbie plays her, lives for the moment — she’s at her most ecstatic watching her local bodega chef cook her up an egg sandwich. But after all the mischief she caused with the Joker, she’s in the crosshairs of the police, in particular Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), who is played as a character out of a bad ’80s cop movie (that’s literally the film’s joke about her). Then Roman, a.k.a. the supervillain Black Mask, puts the screws on Harley by giving her until midnight to retrieve a large diamond from Roman’s henchwoman, Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), who has double-crossed him by stealing it — and swallowing it. McGregor plays Roman as a pretentious art fop who, between his Botox injections, like to slice other people’s faces off. He has an art collection of masks and shrunken heads that link up with this particular sadistic fetish, and McGregor makes him less a grand gangster than a life-size deviant slime.
The script, by Christina Hodson (“Bumblebee”), has attitude to spare, but in a rather bare-bones way. It’s going for the sparky nihilist defiance of “Deadpool,” with a running fourth-wall-breaking commentary by Harley, and there are cheeky character IDs ripping across the screen, as when Harley discovers herself under attack by the driver behind her, identified as “Some Frida Kahlo-looking a$$hole” (which she indeed is). But if the film’s (black) heart is in the right acid place, “Birds of Prey” could have used more of the intricate cleverness of “Deadpool.” The actresses who come together to form Harley’s posse, like Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Roman’s nightclub chanteuse Black Canary or Ella Jay Basco as the wily Cassandra, have presence to spare, but you wish they’d been given more to do.
Directing her first studio feature, Cathy Yan keeps it all hurtling along with impeccable ferocity. Her action scenes have a deftly detonating visual spaciousness, capped by crowd-pleasing moments like the one where Harley, brandishing a baseball bat, ricochets it off the floor with perfect slow-mo timing. And Yan sprinkles just the right songs (“I Hate Myself For Loving You,” an update of Ram Jam’s 1977 version of “Black Betty,” “Barracuda”) throughout what feels like a music-video comic-book jamboree, though one that effectively taps into undercurrents of feminine rage. If there’s a subversive element to “Birds of Prey,” it’s that Harley is a social deviant who was once a respectable professional woman. That she went over the edge, and lived to tell the tale, indicates how much more there is to the current moment of empowerment than the mere dream of successfully fitting in.
THR
Margot Robbie reprises the role of Harley Quinn in Cathy Yan's film about a group of DC Comics women who are forced to fight together.
A second (live action) chance for a much-loved DC Comics character to overtake the big screen, Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey rescues the anarchic cutie Harley Quinn from 2016's execrable would-be franchise starter Suicide Squad, pairing her with a nascent all-woman band of crimefighters.
Billed on posters under the unwieldy title Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), it's the second ensemble outing for a character (and, with Margot Robbie, a performance) screaming for the spotlight — or, at worst, second billing to the most charismatic villain in comics, the Joker. Leaning more heavily into action than laughs, the pic largely delivers on that front. But those hoping for a Deadpool-like fusion of mayhem and wit should lower their expectations: Harley may be known for her unpredictability, but Birds plays by action-movie rules.
The best news here is that this film requires no experience with its predecessor. All you need to know about Quinn is explained in a combination of animation and voiceover early on: Born Harleen Quinzel, she had daddy issues and a Catholic-school upbringing. She became a shrink, then was assigned to work with the Joker during one of his many periods of incarceration. She fell in love with the psychopath, helped him escape, and became the "badass broad" behind many of his crimes. But as Birds begins, they've broken up for good.
Harley, accustomed to doing any crazy, violent thing that enters her mind, doesn't realize how protected she has been by the public's fear of Joker. Once word of their split gets out, every underworld denizen she's ever wronged wants her head on a plate — few more than Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), a crime lord also known as Black Mask. A vain, hammy villain whose affectations include wearing monogrammed gloves no matter the weather, Sionis is bent on obtaining a diamond that, however valuable in its own right, holds the key to a much vaster fortune. But that gem is casually stolen by a pickpocket named Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), and Sionis agrees to spare Harley's life if she'll find the diamond for him.
Christina Hodson's screenplay indulges in a couple of epic flashbacks as it lays this premise out, sometimes disrupting chronological momentum for no clear purpose. When it starts pulling other women into the action, its time-hopping seems largely an excuse to (along with the film's score) imitate Kill Bill: We meet Helena Bertinelli (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the sole living member of the family who once owned that magnificent diamond. After she saw her parents and siblings killed, Helena trained for decades so she could get revenge. She's now the Huntress, and, despite the fun she has with a small-scale crossbow, Winstead's the most under-used actor in the film.
The other Birds, coming to the action from different angles, are an underappreciated police detective named Montoya (Rosie Perez) and a singer named Dinah (Jurnee Smollett-Bell). Comics fans will know that Dinah, nicknamed Black Canary, has a superpower up her sleeve. But that only emerges very late in the tale, and Smollett-Bell enjoys the script's second most fully realized part, playing a woman who can't escape being employed by Roman Sionis.
As she throws Harley Quinn into various kinds of trouble, convinces her to save the young thief instead of turning her over, and has the women team up to fight Roman's ever-expanding gang, Yan finds plenty of opportunities for exciting set pieces: Extravagant action choreography makes the most of colorful set design, unlikely gimmicks and wrasslin'-style brutality. But Hodson's script offers far less diverting banter than it might've between the fight scenes, and has a hard time imagining the unconstrained id that makes Harley Quinn so magnetic. One or two beautiful sequences — like the one in which Harley's longing for a perfect breakfast sandwich leads to tragedy — don't suffice to keep the character's magnetic madness alive onscreen.
Nor does the picture suggest there'd be any reason to watch a Birds of Prey movie that stars only the crimefighters who'll eventually adopt that name. Without Harley Quinn, these are characters who'd be doing well to carry a basic-cable TV series. Cassandra Cain, in the comics, is one of many women who fight crime under the Batgirl moniker. But nothing in Birds of Prey suggests she'd ever merit further attention, far out in this suburb of Gotham with Batman nowhere to be found.
Margot Robbie reprises the role of Harley Quinn in Cathy Yan's film about a group of DC Comics women who are forced to fight together.
A second (live action) chance for a much-loved DC Comics character to overtake the big screen, Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey rescues the anarchic cutie Harley Quinn from 2016's execrable would-be franchise starter Suicide Squad, pairing her with a nascent all-woman band of crimefighters.
Billed on posters under the unwieldy title Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), it's the second ensemble outing for a character (and, with Margot Robbie, a performance) screaming for the spotlight — or, at worst, second billing to the most charismatic villain in comics, the Joker. Leaning more heavily into action than laughs, the pic largely delivers on that front. But those hoping for a Deadpool-like fusion of mayhem and wit should lower their expectations: Harley may be known for her unpredictability, but Birds plays by action-movie rules.
The best news here is that this film requires no experience with its predecessor. All you need to know about Quinn is explained in a combination of animation and voiceover early on: Born Harleen Quinzel, she had daddy issues and a Catholic-school upbringing. She became a shrink, then was assigned to work with the Joker during one of his many periods of incarceration. She fell in love with the psychopath, helped him escape, and became the "badass broad" behind many of his crimes. But as Birds begins, they've broken up for good.
Harley, accustomed to doing any crazy, violent thing that enters her mind, doesn't realize how protected she has been by the public's fear of Joker. Once word of their split gets out, every underworld denizen she's ever wronged wants her head on a plate — few more than Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), a crime lord also known as Black Mask. A vain, hammy villain whose affectations include wearing monogrammed gloves no matter the weather, Sionis is bent on obtaining a diamond that, however valuable in its own right, holds the key to a much vaster fortune. But that gem is casually stolen by a pickpocket named Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), and Sionis agrees to spare Harley's life if she'll find the diamond for him.
Christina Hodson's screenplay indulges in a couple of epic flashbacks as it lays this premise out, sometimes disrupting chronological momentum for no clear purpose. When it starts pulling other women into the action, its time-hopping seems largely an excuse to (along with the film's score) imitate Kill Bill: We meet Helena Bertinelli (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the sole living member of the family who once owned that magnificent diamond. After she saw her parents and siblings killed, Helena trained for decades so she could get revenge. She's now the Huntress, and, despite the fun she has with a small-scale crossbow, Winstead's the most under-used actor in the film.
The other Birds, coming to the action from different angles, are an underappreciated police detective named Montoya (Rosie Perez) and a singer named Dinah (Jurnee Smollett-Bell). Comics fans will know that Dinah, nicknamed Black Canary, has a superpower up her sleeve. But that only emerges very late in the tale, and Smollett-Bell enjoys the script's second most fully realized part, playing a woman who can't escape being employed by Roman Sionis.
As she throws Harley Quinn into various kinds of trouble, convinces her to save the young thief instead of turning her over, and has the women team up to fight Roman's ever-expanding gang, Yan finds plenty of opportunities for exciting set pieces: Extravagant action choreography makes the most of colorful set design, unlikely gimmicks and wrasslin'-style brutality. But Hodson's script offers far less diverting banter than it might've between the fight scenes, and has a hard time imagining the unconstrained id that makes Harley Quinn so magnetic. One or two beautiful sequences — like the one in which Harley's longing for a perfect breakfast sandwich leads to tragedy — don't suffice to keep the character's magnetic madness alive onscreen.
Nor does the picture suggest there'd be any reason to watch a Birds of Prey movie that stars only the crimefighters who'll eventually adopt that name. Without Harley Quinn, these are characters who'd be doing well to carry a basic-cable TV series. Cassandra Cain, in the comics, is one of many women who fight crime under the Batgirl moniker. But nothing in Birds of Prey suggests she'd ever merit further attention, far out in this suburb of Gotham with Batman nowhere to be found.
BeachBum Unreal
SD Born & Raised: 760, 619
BeachBum Unreal
SD Born & Raised: 760, 619
My bad, just saw this
there’s isn’t an after credits scene, but you should still stick around til the credits roll..
there’s something, but it’s not a scene
Brandeezy
Superstar
Heard the added The Suicide Squad post credit to the opening day screenings
that would be dope if true
The screening I saw didn’t have one
all it had was some message from Harley... don’t know her dialogue verbatim but she said something like
“wait, you guys are still waiting for another scene? Okay well, The Batma..”
and the message abruptly cuts off
“wait, you guys are still waiting for another scene? Okay well, The Batma..”
and the message abruptly cuts off
Brandeezy
Superstar
that would be dope if true
The screening I saw didn’t have one
all it had was some message from Harley... don’t know her dialogue verbatim but she said something like
“wait, you guys are still waiting for another scene? Okay well, The Batma..”
and the message abruptly cuts off
Yeah I heard the line is a running gag in the movie
BeachBum Unreal
SD Born & Raised: 760, 619
Haven’t seen a negative review yet other than Grace Randolph, but she been hating on this movie since Development:
63 on metacritic. 
Brandeezy
Superstar
63 on metacritic.
MC is
fukking IW is sitting at 68 but Endgame is 78 despite one being way better than the other
MC is
fukking IW is sitting at 68 but Endgame is 78 despite one being way better than the other
Good point. IW is 1,000 times better than Endgame.