‘Birds of Prey’ or — Bad Animals?
‘Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn’ (2020) is a break-up movie although not, despite the film repeatedly hammering it into our skulls, between a certain Ms Quinn and the Joker but really between the future of DC movies and the remains of their previously attempted extended universe because even though there are almost constant references to Mr. J, the Clown Prince of Crime is strikingly present by his absence, specifically Jared Leto whom we never glimpse yet are teased with. The movie plays it coy and it’s noticeable so the feeling is of a project put into production before the Synder-verse collapsed and Joaquin Phoenix became a left-field usurper because you can feel the movie struggling to keep what came before out of frame. And that’s only the start of this movie’s problems.
‘Birds of Prey’ is a mess and I talking to the point of almost total impenetrability. It starts with a flashback before moving onto more flashbacks before then having flashbacks WITHIN flashbacks and ultimately leading to a state of the total and complete disorientation of time; it’s so temporally confusing it makes ‘Last Year At Marienbad’ (1961) seem perfectly linear and a beacon of structural clarity. Not only that but it doesn’t seem to contain a narrative… of any kind. It took forty minutes until what I suspected might be the actual plot to kick in and even then my hunch was a wild stab in the dark because the plot’s nothing more than a mcguffin with nothing else supporting it. There is no narrative meat, no substance, here at all, just a continuous sequence of frantic, staccato bursts of frenzy as the movie screams for our attention. The result is a film which consists of nothing but exclamation points.
The plot is… well, I’m an hour out of the cinema and I still can’t understand what any of it was about. I think it had to do with a diamond but it’s not really about that. Is it to do with Harley herself? No, because she’s insane to the point of unrelatability and so kooky that personal growth is impossible, let alone genuine emancipation. And why is the word ‘emancipation’ in the title anyway? There’s no female empowerment going on here of any kind and any sense of women’s liberation ‘Birds of Prey’ might contain is head-bangingly flippant. They should’ve re-titled the movie ‘Women’s Glib’.
Yet the most annoying aspect is, without a doubt, Ewan McGregor who makes Jessie Eisenberg’s performance as Lex Luthor in ‘Batman v Superman’ (2016) appear nuanced and restrained. It’s as though McGregor had simply walked onto set after downing multiple espressos and just started shouting at everyone as himself with even bothering to act or even attempt an American accent. He seems to come from the Brian Glover/Sean Connery school of vocal dexterity where ‘Fuck it, my own voice will do fine’ is their finely crafted skill they spent years perfecting.
Any positives? The fight scenes are kept grounded and relatively CGI free, it’s under two hours and they use a Heart song at one point, but that’s about it. The rest is a boring, confusing disaster in story-telling that left me longing to be emancipated from the fucking theatre.
