Many of the Joker’s scenes were ultimately cut from the film, but his dumb stink still lingered in the film all that sweaty effort to do something edgy and subversive tainted an already plenty tainted project. That film, directed leadenly by David Ayer, was perhaps most famous for what we didn’t end up seeing much of: Jared Leto’s tortured, and torturing, read on the Joker, a much ballyhooed, then embarrassing Method stunt that had Leto reportedly mailing dead animals to his co-stars to really get into character. It’s also that the movie-sort of a standalone adventure for Joker sidekick Harley Quinn-shakes off the turgid, self-serious weight of most of DC’s past films.īirds of Prey particularly makes a delightful hash of its immediate predecessor, 2016’s loathsome Suicide Squad, which introduced Margot Robbie’s take on the Harley character. It’s not just that director Cathy Yan has filled her film with bold colors, fantasy and animation sequences, and narrative loops. The film makes hay of this simple inversion - both in a labored, hat-on-a-hat way (Harley compares the group's climactic last stand to a sleepover) and in more knowing, subtle flashes (one character helpfully tosses a hairband to her long-tressed teammate mid-fight).A bright, refreshing energy runs through the new DC Comics film Birds of Prey, a rarity in comic book-based films at this point. What Birds of Prey has going for it that Suicide Squad did not, besides Robbie's indefatigable brio, is of course the fact that its butt-kicking lead characters are women - including women of color, one of whom's canonically queer - and the butts they proceed to kick with such verve and elan belong to men. A rough spot that functioned like a cinematic black hole somehow capable of swallowing up the charisma of both Robbie and Will Freaking Smith from that doleful event horizon no light, nor heat, nor fun could escape. Suicide Squad, you'll remember - the film in which she debuted as Harley - was nothing but one long, glum, cynical, confusing, assembled-by-committee rough spot. Divas: Who Will Win The Great Comic Book Cheesecake-Off? Winstead gets the least screentime here, for example, but she manages to imbue her scenes with a quirkiness that's specific, not phoned-in - not standard-issue "Hollywood weird." Of course their personalities slot neatly into types - there's even a running gag about how Perez's character talks like a cop in an action movie (which is kind of cheating, let's agree) - but in a film as crowded and frenetic as this one, types are useful, if your actors are up to the task. The rag-tag crew in question sports some pretty ragged tags: There's just-dumped-by-the-Joker Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), cop-with-a-chip-on-her-shoulder Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), nightclub-singer-with-a-heart-of-gold Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) and brooding-socially-awkward-vigilante Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). you know what never mind, not important) and are willing to murder an innocent (Ella Jay Basco) to get it a rag-tag crew is forced to work together to keep that from happening and punish said guy, and said hench (along with a horde of day-players in riot gear), in the process. So it should come as no surprise that the plot of Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) feels like it's running along on some well-worn rails: Bad guy (Ewan McGregor) and his henchman (Chris Messina) want an object (a diamond that. The demands of the genre (innocents to protect, evil to punish, MacGuffins to procure, training to montage) are such that filmmakers are forced to innovate around the margins. The degree to which any given Marvel or DC/Warners movie manages to distinguish itself from the slew of punch-em-ups that have come before is a function of tone, more than anything else. Lunatic, Fringe: Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) finds a whole new, non-suicidal squad in Birds of Prey.
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