Director: Cathy Yan
Distributor: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Duration: 109 minutes
Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
The cinematic universe of the DC always dangles a bit behind that of Marvel. The issue is that DC tried to rush their last few films, creating a certain Avengers story of their own with the Justice League. Sadly, the latter bombed at the box office and they pretty much canceled all plans, safe for the next Wonder Woman movie. The company once again decided to reboot Batman, pretty much killing the story arc with Ben Affleck. At the same time, we also had Suicide Squad, which garnered a lot of attention and got fairly mixed reviews from critics and moviegoers alike. This movie became the stepping stone for Birds of Prey, which revolves around the character of Harley Quinn. The movie flopped and they even changed the name to Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey. This was a certain tactic, showing people that Gotham’s most favorite bad girl got a movie of her own. Sadly, this didn’t do the movie much good either.
Even though the movie’s story goes from one flashback to another during the first hour of the film, it’s basically a story about the end of Harley Quinn’s (Margot Robbie) relationship to the Joker, who isn’t even pictured in this film. Everyone in Gotham always saw The Joker and Harley as a package deal, and this allowed her to do whatever she wanted. She didn’t realize, however, when she made it clear to the rest of Gotham that she was no longer the stark mad clown’s girlfriend, that she would place a target on her own back. This movie is pretty much a collection of what happened after the messy breakup.
There is no proper way to explain the flow of this movie, but it feels off right from the start. At the beginning, you’ll get flashback after flashback, and even flashbacks in flashbacks, making the flow of the film quite messed up. For nearly an hour it feels like the movie is simply giving you the introduction, to wrap things up in the last 40 minutes, and even then things move really slowly. The movie also tries to mimic Deadpool by breaking the fourth wall, but does so in a cheap and unfunny fashion that it annoys you, rather than entertain you. Other than that, the biggest grievance of the movie is actually it being called Birds of Prey, and only revolving around Harley Quinn, until the last ten minutes of the film.
While the cast of this movie isn’t bad, especially with Margot Robbie in the lead, the writing of the movie is extremely awful, diminishing the quality of the acting as well. While Harley Quinn has always been a silly character, she never felt stupid. In Birds of Prey, Harley Quinn feels like she’s a three-year-old trying to live an adult life. We’re all for empowerment and more female lead characters, but dear god, the enemies in this movie felt so incredibly stupid that ‘of course a woman could win’. There was no rhyme or reason why everyone felt so ridiculously dim and that’s pretty much one of the biggest reasons that this cinematic experience became a turd on a fancy plate; you get fancy decors and great acting, but extremely shitty story-writing and execution.
The special features of this movie are quite common, but there are a fair number of them available on the Blu-ray edition. While most content involves the creative process of the movie, there are some fun extras such as a gag reel, to hopefully entertain you a bit more than the movie actually did.
Conclusion
Our site is quite well-known for being fairly lenient when it comes to giving scores. We only have a handful of titles on our platform that got a failing grade, and we always look at the work put into a project, but Birds of Prey was truly a piece of crap. This movie could have been a lot more than a mediocre attempt at copying Deadpool, with hardly any story value and a washed down version of a very popular and loved character. Even if you like pretty much everything that DC throws at you, this movie has no real strong suits, safe for a few fighting scenes, and a fairly well-timed and executed gory scene at the end. If you’re looking for a proper successor of the Suicide Squad movie, we recommend making up your own film, as it will undoubtedly be better.
Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (Blu-ray) - Movie Review,
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