The hook here is that this is girls versus boys, straight down the line; the days when this kind of film would have a wimpy guy on the good girls team, or the bad guy would have a female assassin so the girls had someone to fight are over. This battle of the sexes works better than something like last year's all-female gangster film The Kitchen did, mostly because the superhero genre is literally about empowerment fantasies - even if Margot Robbie's now-single Harley Quinn is largely a quirky, garish bad guy who snorts cocaine mid-fight to level up.
(she does get something of a redemption arc, but it's slight: you don't make money changing a successful superhero)
Quinn is the lead here, with bad guy Black Mask / Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor) in second place camping it up entertainingly when he's not having faces removed or ordering a terrified guest in his club to dance on a table while her date is forced to peel her dress off with a knife. The rest of Quinn's girl gang - Diana / Black Canary (Jurnee Smollet-Bell), Detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco) - tend to get one character trait each, some of which work better than others. Montoya's 80's cop movie banter falls flat every time, while Huntress' failure to maintain her stern avenger persona is fun.
A movie that contains five - six if you count the main bad guy - origin stories is bound to have a lot going on in the script department. Sensibly, the actual plot is extremely straightforward: everyone wants a diamond that has a bunch of bank account details laser-coded into it, and when a character swallows it then we have a reason for this search across a somewhat gritty Gotham (it's like a sunnier version of the city seen in Joker) to run movie length as the good guys wait for it to be pooped out while keeping the swallower away from the bad guys willing to just cut it out.
(is there an article to be written about movies that use someone swallowing the mcguffin as an excuse to drag things out? It feels like there is)
What is a surprise is that so much of the story is a mess. Initially Quinn is telling it and her unbalanced state of mind after being dumped by the (unseen) Joker kind of justifies the going back and forth, but there's a reason why opening a movie mid-action then freeze-framing while a narrator says "let me explain how I got here" is a comedy cliche, and this does that more than once.
All this ducking and weaving eventually settles down, but this definitely feels like a film that's had a going-over in the edit. The multiple origin stories are either told piecemeal or repeatedly, characters are introduced more than once, other characters are built up then vanish (what happened to the DA?), and the "birds of prey" don't even get together until the final act. While none of this is exactly fatal, if this is trying to sweep an audience along on sheer energy alone then it's not exactly Goodfellas.
The good news is that this does get right the only things we really care about in superhero movies: the characters are mostly memorable and the fights are largely entertaining. Not all the cast get a real chance to shine - this probably could have lost at least one Birds of Prey team member, especially as their girl gang chemistry isn't great - and the fights occasionally feel a little samey, but by the final act it's all settled into a groove that's solidly, if not all that spectacularly, entertaining.
- Anthony Morris
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