3+1 Short Paragraphs: Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

2020, Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs) -- download

This is the first of probably a long series of posts about Watching During the Pause. This is a new world, a scary world, a world where studios cannot release new movies to the cinemas, so they are releasing first (or releasing early) to Online. And thus, if it's online, it can be pirated. But a lot more movies will get out there, a lot more movies will hit the services people are already signed up for, or were considering. Like I said in days past, seeing movies Online will become a thing when they make it easier to just pay & watch than figuring out a way to pirate safely.

Harley Quinn was born not of the Batman comics, but of the Batman: the Animated Series. She's The Joker's girlfriend and partner in psychotic crime, who began her career as his therapist. In the movies, she got her introduction via Suicide Squad which gathered together a bunch of Batman villains to fight and even Badder Guy. Birds of Prey started as a comic with Black Canary and Barbara Gordon / Oracle, but later expanded to include The Huntress, and even later versions included Gordon as Batgirl. I am not sure there is was ever a version that included Harley or Cassandra Cain or Renee Montoya, but the latter got her start in The Animated Series as well, so at least there is a tenuous connection. AND Cain actually is one of the Batgirls of later, so again tenuous connection. What I am getting at is that the label this movie grabbed makes no sense and I am not sure why the producers, Margot Robbie included, wanted to tie them together.

So, this is Harley (Margot Robbie, I, Tonya) post Suicide Squad and the Joker broke up with her. She's despondent, drowning her sorrows in the seedy clubs of Gotham's underground, and lacking friends. But she does have a new pet hyena named Bruce. She doesn't mean to, but ends up dragged into a plot involving Bad Guy Roman Sionis (Ewan McGrego, The Impossible), his club singer Dinah Lance (sans Ollie Queen; Jurnee Smollett-Bell, True Blood ), revenge fueled Crossbow Killer Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Sky High) and older than your usual cop detective Montoya (Rosie Perez, Fearless). Oh, and there is a kid pickpocket who bears the name Cassandra Cain. After much rather humdrum misadventure, Harley convinces them all to team up with her to fight back against Sionis.

I went in with no malice intended against this movie. I didn't really know what to expect, beyond a bunch of psychedelic, over the top sequences focused on Margot Robbie. I wasn't sure how they were connecting her to the comic, but didn't really care. I also didn't care that this was part of the flop DC Universe. A nice stand-alone movie would be nice. Alas... sigh. It was just so very very tired and second rate. The acting was wooden, oh so painfully so for Winstead. The action scenes were ... lazy? I almost felt like I was watching cable TV. There we some fun scenes, like Harley invading the police station, and the car chase on roller skates, but beyond that I was just ... bored. Maybe its out current state of mind, maybe its the current state of the world, where maybe I need to be much further pulled out of reality to enjoy myself, but to me, this movie was even more unsatisfying than the Justice League movies that were at least pretty.