A mediocre movie that never found it’s footing, nor did it find a story that actually seemed interesting other than “Harley is a complete fuck up”. It’s a shame because I love Harley as a character, and I love Margot Robbie as an actress and I love all the other actresses and actors in the film, but there’s just not much to work with here. I should point out that DC is continuing their habit of taking well known characters and changing them so much that they’re nearly unrecognizable. Harley herself was the first example of this from Suicide Squad, but in a rare happenstance, that actually worked out for the better, as the more minimalistic costume worked better for the silver screen than the big harley helmet would have. The same cannot be said for Black Mask, Rene Montoya, Black Canary, or Cassandra Cain. Again, I love the work that they’ve done, but in every case, they were miscast or playing characters that were only barely recognizable as their comic book counter parts, Cassandra Cain being the worst case of this. In the comics, she’s a mute assassin, trained by her father to murder from the time she was a toddler. In this movie, she’s a kid in the foster system that’s pick pocketing random people on the hard streets of Gotham, sans back story. To mention the name of the movie itself: “Birds of Prey” is a group of do gooders that are led by Oracle, who was previously Batgirl before she was shot through her spine by The Joker.
The one saving grace of “Birds of Prey” is that it gives me an opportunity to tell you about the much higher quality and more better well written “Harley Quinn” cartoon series that’s on right now. Skip the movie and watch the TV show.
This movie felt like they took aspects from other, better, movies. A little Deadpool, Kill Bill and Goodfellas with a touch of Pulp Fiction.