At the behest of star and producer Margot Robbie, the working title for (deep breath) Birds Of Prey was ‘Fox Force Five’. For the uninitiated, ‘Fox Force Five’ is Mia Wallace’s (Uma Thurman) never-aired TV pilot in Pulp Fiction concerning five female secret agents each with a distinct identity and skill — a knife thrower, a kung fu master, a demolition expert and a French girl whose “speciality was sex”. It’s a particularly apt part-time alias for Robbie’s passion project, the first big-screen outing for DC’s all-women superhero squad. Because Birds Of Prey not only shares the DNA of a girl gang who can kick your sorry ass — Cathy Yan’s film also boasts some of the subversive and rockabilly spirit of QT’s ’94 classic. It doesn’t all work, but it’s a gaudy, muddled, mostly entertaining glitter-grenade celebration of just how women can fuck shit up.
Perhaps the first rug-pull is that it isn’t strictly a Birds Of Prey flick at all. It’s a moving-on-after-a-break-up movie, a Marriage Story with punch-ups. Quickly recapping the events of Suicide Squad in animated form, we quickly learn Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Joker have broken up — she publically updates her relationship status by driving a truck into Ace Chemicals, the plant where she pledged herself to the clown prince of crime — and the film frenetically establishes her trying to cope on her own; buying a hyena she calls Bruce (after Wayne), roller derbying, her partying antics captured in one long shot like a coked-up 1917. The film sets up the question of who is Harley without Mr J? The answer lies with a motley crew of diverse women.
It’s a fun, fidgety, breathless start, but don’t expect it to settle any time soon. The film is narrated by Harley Quinn so unravels with all the logic you’d expect from her cracked psyche. Taking a cue from her protagonist, screenwriter Christina Hodson (Bumblebee) begins to fracture the narrative, drip-feeding plot points and introducing us to the major players; Renee Montoya (Perez), a detective belittled in her job and hooked on the dialogue and tropes of ’80s cop shows, is investigating a hit by crossbow-wielding assassin Huntress (Winstead); Dinah Lance (Smollett-Bell), a singer who goes by the monicker Black Canary and is capable of smashing martini glasses with her voice, powerfully warbles in the nightclub of Gotham crime lord Roman Sionis (McGregor); and then there is Cassandra Cain (Basco), a streetwise pickpocket who becomes the fulcrum for the story.
It’s so much fun when the group finally come together, it feels like a misstep not getting them together sooner.
It’s not, as Harley might say, poifect. It’s structurally chaotic. There are flashbacks within flashbacks and comedy title-cards (“4 Minutes Ago”) but the time-shifting dissipates momentum in the middle stretch — you never get the sense that Yan, whose only previous feature is absurdist satire Dead Pigs, has a firm grip on the narrative. McGregor’s antagonist — who runs the town and has a penchant for both African art and peeling the face off rivals — nibbles rather than chews scenery; he isn’t big and flamboyant enough to pose a genuine threat.
Yan and Hodson throw a ton of ideas at the screen, most of which stick: Harley interacting with her own voiceover, Marilyn Monroe fantasies, direct stares to camera, and a fun running gag about the grievances every character has with Ms Quinn — the most exquisite delivers a terrific Frida Kahlo gag. Conceived with John Wick’s Chad Staheski and his stunt team 87Eleven, the action sequences are muscular and confident — a creative baseball bat frenzy to Ram Jam’s ‘Black Betty’ (bam-a-lam), a fight in a fun house that has the feel of ’60s Batman — but Yan still manages to insert some personality in there: as Harley double teams with Black Canary, keep ’em peeled for a hair-tie handoff that any woman in a fight would relate to. It’s a lovely touch that would never occur to the David Ayers of this world.
It’s a film forged in the age of #MeToo / #TimesUp but wears any messaging lightly. This is just a group of women supporting each other, getting things done. It’s so much fun when the group finally come together, it feels like a misstep not getting them together sooner and more often. Save Harley, the characters aren’t deeply drawn but they are winningly played: Smollett-Bell is authentically hard-as-nails, Winstead is funny as an assassin who takes umbrage that people get her superhero name wrong, and Perez reminds you she is not in nearly enough movies. But the MVP is Robbie, who lends Harley charming quirk and believable menace, hinting at Harley’s inner life without reams of dialogue. When she’s on screen Birds Of Prey has the impact of a baseball bat to the head.
