Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Huntress, full of the familiar tropes of comic book superhero stories that we’ve seen before, but Winstead brings a real tongue-in-cheek approach to her that is a lot of fun to watch, and pokes fun at the silly nature of these male revenge fantasies at the same time. When the Joker is front and center, the power of that character is largely diminished.) (To be fair, I feel the same way about the Joker too. If I have any complaints about Harley, it’s that she’s a character that is more effective in smaller doses Harley can grate after an extended length of time, but that’s the nature of the character. She’s completely engaged for the entirety of the movie. Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn is obviously having a blast.
Birds of Prey is chock full of characters that we enjoy. So I have to approach Birds of Prey on a mostly empirical level – does it work as a movie? And, without this being a Consumer Reports kind of review, I say yes. I don’t want to be that white guy film critic explaining this stuff to anyone. (If there’s one redeemable male character in Birds of Prey, it’s the guy who makes Harley Quinn an egg sandwich at the beginning of the film.Īnd granted, it’s a hell of an egg sandwich.) Just as Batman is the fantasy of men everywhere, Birds of Prey gives women heroes to cheer for as well.Īnd look, I’m fully aware that I’m not really the audience for this either. There may be a lot of bruised egos out there who may react badly to Birds of Prey, and to those men all I can say is that this movie wasn’t meant for you. Legs get broken, noses get busted, and male egos shatter under the blows of Harley Quinn’s ( Margot Robbie) hammer. A PG-13, family-friendly version of this movie would surely reduce the impact, even as it also reduces the audience who may see it, but that can’t be helped.Īnd there’s a lot of impact. Perhaps a rated R film is the proper venue for this after all this kind of justified rage demands a body count. Every character in Birds of Prey has a grievance (so much so that, when a new character is introduced, we get to see each grievance on screen like it’s a statistic on a Dungeons and Dragons character sheet) and while Birds of Prey is light and frothy, the underlying anger is not. Birds of Prey offers a lot of the same anarchic fun of Deadpool with a decidedly feminist angle, but all the chaos and mayhem is just frosting on the cake of a deeper meaning and message. That’s not a criticism of the movie, by the way. With films like Deadpool and Joker bringing the box office, and the DC Harley Quinn show being decidedly more adult than most animated fare, I should have expected it. In a film with a lot of bad guys being dispatched in an increasingly violent manner, I imagine I would be thinking just how far the PG-13 rating is being tested these days.
I almost wish I didn’t find this out before seeing the movie, because I would have really wondered what’s happening with the MPA (previously MPAA) these days. I didn’t know that Birds of Prey was rated R. A funny thing happened on the way to my press screening to Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (and if you think I’m typing that title full-on again in this review, well, we’ll see how the word count goes), and I blame myself entirely.
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