Birds of Prey
This is a spinoff of The Suicide Squad which I didn’t care for. It was all over the place and nobody was that likeable. So when I saw Birds of Prey was going to concentrate on the Harley Quinn character I thought that possibly they had learned from the mistakes of Suicide Squad and this would be a way better movie. Margo Robbie who plays Harley Quinn was the one bright spot in The Suicide Squad and she is a really good actor.
The story is Harley Quinn and The Joker have broken up. Instead of moping around Harley has decided to buy a hyena, keep it in her bathtub, and get on with her life. The one thing she has left out of the equation is the fact that she has treated people horribly, and done terrible things to very dangerous people. She could get away with everything because she was Joker’s girlfriend. Since everybody was terrified of the Joker, Harley was untouchable. Now that they are broke up she is fair game. Every bad person in Gotham wants to kill her. This leads to multiple fight scenes where multiple bad guys twice as big as she is, with guns cannot handle Harley Quinn armed with a baseball bat. She also manages to get on the bad side of the major villain in this movie, Black Mask, played by Ewan McGregor. Ewan McGregor is a really talented actor but he sucked, and was the absolutely wrong choice for this role. His presence was a damp towel on any scene he’s in. The big plot point is a diamond that everybody is after that is swallowed by a young pickpocket named Cassandra Cain, played by Ela Jay Basco. Harley is trying to get it back with laxatives and prune juice and Black Mask is wanting to use a knife. As thin as the plot is, it allows for the introduction the characters that will be the rest of The Birds of Prey. There is police detective Renee Montoya, played by Rosie Perez. A crossbow wielding assassin who calls herself The Huntress, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. And a nightclub singer called Black Canary, played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell.
The best thing in this movie is Margo Robbie, but she is so manic, so crazy, it can be annoying.
The rest of the Birds of Prey don’t have enough of a back story for you to fully get into the characters. They just pop in and out to fight with Harley Quinn until the final fight scene where they join forces. There are flashbacks within flashbacks and an out of nowhere Broadway type singing number that I still don’t get.
It is Rated R, and it seemed like they tried to go for a Deadpool type of thing, but they fell way short. I did not like the movie and found it very tedious and sometimes annoying. But in the last 15 minutes I leaned over to Carla and said, “This sucks”, she immediately look at me like I was crazy and said “I really like it!” So, maybe it is more appealing to women. Of course the strong kick ass women is part of it, but I think the fact that all the fighting and action scenes were more cartoonish, less really violent and bloody. Unlike John Wick or Deadpool. Still action but not gross. So, even though I didn’t like it, a lot of critics did and more importantly my wife did, so give it a shot.
My Score: 2 Buds
My Wife: 4 Buds
