Can I just begin by asking what is it about DC that they cannot, for the life of them, make a good movie? And yes, Wonder Woman is a genuinely good super hero movie, with a tight plot, great characters, a great bad-guy reveal, solid action, good character arcs, and everything you want in a popcorn movie. And while I don’t want to dis Patty Jenkins, I have to wonder how the hell did she manage to make that movie for people who clearly cannot figure out how to do it twice?
And, yes, Joker grabbed a couple of Oscars this week. For a film that is not part of the DC Extended Universe and has no connection to the rest of the DC character stable (DC’s Batwoman show even went out of their way to point out the Joker in their universe is definitely NOT Arthur Fleck). And, frankly, I thought Joker was a pretty mediocre movie. Not to mention, Joaquin Phoenix’s characterization of the Joker was derivative and nothing we haven’t seen a hundred times before. And the film itself was little more than a moderately successful Scorsese pastiche dressed in clown make-up.
But let’s get down to this movie,Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn).
Needless to say, there will be spoilers.
So what’s wrong with this film? Lots. Let’s begin with the premise, that this is a film about the Birds of Prey, a DC comics character team, originating in 1996 with a team-up of Black Canary and Barbara Gordon, formerly Batgirl, now called Oracle after being paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair by the Joker. The group has included various additional characters over the years, including Huntress, Lady Blackhawk, Poison Ivy, Catwoman, Power Girl and even a handful of male characters, like Nightwing and Hawk. Interestingly, the comics group has never included Harley Quinn, Reneé Montoya, or Cassandra Cain, who appear in this film.
The story is pretty basic: Teenage MacGuffin and pickpocket Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco ) steals yet another MacGuffin (a valuable diamond) from the film’s Big Bad, Roman Sionis (Ewan MacGregor). When Sionis puts a $500,000 bounty on Cain’s head, Harley Quinn saves her from the dozens of hit men and bounty hunters trying to kill her and, eventually, they kill Sionis. Oh, yes, some other women show up and do stuff but, really, none of them actually do anything significant or have any real purpose for existing except they are named in the film’s title.
The serious problem with this film is simply that it’s a John Wick movie with sidekicks who don’t really bring anything to the party. John Wick, as many of you know, is an action film franchise headed by Keanu Reeves in the title role. The films are fun and well-made for what they are, but little more than an excuse to watch Keanu beat people up for 90 minutes. BOP(AFEOHQ) is no different. And that’s a real problem.
The film’s Birds of Prey consist of Harley Quinn, cynical police detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), cabaret singer and reluctant bad guy chauffeur, Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), mob princess turned assassin, Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and the aforementioned teenage pick pocket, Cassandra Cain.
None of the Birds of Prey have any actual need to be in the film. Montoya has a bare-bones excuse because she plays the cop out looking for Quinn and Cain, and trying to bring the bad guy to justice. Fine. But she doesn’t need to be a “Bird of Prey” to do that. She’s nothing more than a central-casting stereotype of a burned-out, alcoholic, cynical cop character without an original bone in her body or beat in her performance. There’s a running gag in the film that she talks like a stereotypical “1980’s movie detective,” and she does, but that’s no excuse to actually make her nothing more than a stereotypical 1980’s movie detective. And that’s really all she is.
It’s an ongoing problem throughout this film
Black Canary actually has a role to play and is the only “Bird” who has anything close to a character arc. Smollett-Bell does a good job portraying this character who goes from being a dispirited cabaret singer working for Sionis, to being his dispirited personal driver, to being a dispirited Bird of Prey. She’s also the film’s only character who has an actual super power: She can “sing” a hypersonic “Canary Cry” that can kill and knock people down. But she never uses it until the film’s climactic battle where we learn that, in this iteration of the character, using her power even once knocks her out. Kind of a cheesy way to sideline the film’s only super powered character so she doesn’t outshine the rest of the cast. Of course, like the rest of the main cast, she’s also a super-duper kung-fu fighter who can easily beat the crap out of any man, no matter how big he is, so she doesn’t really need her super power, anyway.
Huntress is the most pointless character in the film. The daughter of a former mob kingpin, Helena Bertinielli’s entire family was killed, en masse, Romanov-style, by a rival gang leader. The sole survivor, she was spirited away to Sicily and raised to be a master assassin. She returns to Gotham to get her revenge by killing all the people who killed her family. Amazingly, several of them are encountered just as they are about to kill Harley! Deus ex Crossbow! Or something. Huntress’ character provides a weak sub-plot as Montoya and others briefly try to find the “Crossbow Killer,” but this gets dropped early on and is never mentioned again. The problem with the character is that all of her motivation derives from exposition about what occurred to her before the start of this film, and her only reason to be in this film or take any action in this film is to be a deus ex machina way to save Harley Quinn from two of the bad guys. She has no character arc, no other reason to be here. Her character does not begin, grow, or change because of any event that occurs in this movie. There is no compelling reason in this movie for her character to be the one who does what she does. She’s basically existing in an entirely different mini-movie that just happens to all but randomly intersect with this film. Oh, and there’s a running gag that she wants to be called Huntress, but everyone else wants to call her the “Crossbow Killer,” and it makes her sad. This film’s entire idea of character development seems to be “give them a running gag.” I also have a hard time believing in a bad-ass professional assassin spends any of her off time standing around, dressed in a pink cami, looking at herself in the mirror, and practicing saying, “They call me... Huntress.” I bet Black Widow never does that. I just think someone who has spent that last 15 years learning to be a heartless killer would have a bit more gravitas but, oh right, the running gag thing. At least give her a black cami to wear. Oh, and her character’s costume is terrible; it kind of looks like she’s dressed in lightly tailored trash bags. What were they thinking?
The film’s Big Bad is Roman Sionis, also called Black Mask, but we are never told exactly why this is, except he sometimes – OK, once – wears a black plastic mask while still referring to himself as Roman Sionis (so, um, why the mask? And who is it who actually does call you Black Mask? Obviously, it’s not you… So, who? But I digress.). Like most of the characters in this film, Sionis is straight outa central casting playing the part of a Crazy Evil Bad Guy. He’s also a flashy dresser – because he’s gay! No, really, while not Ru Paul-in-drag gay, the character is played so offensively “gay” it gets old really fast. MacGregor apparently felt his performance was so subtle he had to make a big announcement a while back saying that, yes, his character is gay! (Sorry, Ewan, just not that subtle.) But, hey, gotta do something to bring that profitable gay demographic into theaters, amirite? Maybe next time try doing it by not insulting them. Look, I really want to talk about this, but let’s go to the next character, first, because it’s germane.
Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina) is Sionos’ main henchman, a vicious, violent, serial killer who is also desperately in love with Sionis, but it’s never clear if they are actual lovers or not (they never do anything icky and gay like kiss or hug or show any normal level of affection for each other. Zsasz just gazes longingly at Sionis and bitchily at anyone he thinks is being mean to his sweetie). This character was realized wonderfully in the Gotham TV show by actor Anthony Carrigan, who stole every scene he was in. Messina’s characterization, not so much. Not to sound like a broken record, but his performance is such an exercise in stock, stereotypical, lazy, well inside the box, “look at me play an evil, evil gay guy” sub-par “acting” that’s it’s just demeaning to even watch.
So let’s talk about the film’s gay representation. But first, hasn’t the world had enough of the “Evil violent gay psycho serial killer” trope? For fuck’s sake, you can draw a straight (ha-ha) line from 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever Wint and Kidd gay serial killer hit man couple, through Silence of the Lamb’s Buffalo Bill gay serial killer, to MacGregor’ and Messina’s characterizations in this film. And plenty more in between. The whole “The serial killer is gay!” thing has largely replaced “The butler did it,” in the Movie and TV trope hall of fame. It’s long past time to put this lazy, sleazy trope in its grave.
OK, so the film actually has several LGBT characters, but it never really commits to them (in fact it actively runs from them) and pretty much all of the characterizations of them are decidedly negative. There are, of course, Sionis and Zsasz, the “Are they or aren’t they a couple?” couple the world definitely does not need. Then there is a brief aside that reveals Montoya is gay and her former girl friend is the assistant DA (Ali Wong) who she is constantly at odds with in the film. So this film’s idea of lesbians is the acrimonious former couple who just can’t get along. Stereotype check and check! Next there is Harley Quinn, herself, well known as sexually fluid, who has been in a long-term, on-again-off-again sexual relationship with Poison Ivy. But you’d have a hard time knowing that from this film because the only reference to it is during a brief cartoon exposition that lays out Harley’s erstwhile relationship with the Joker and that ends with her referencing other former lovers, the last of whom, flashing on the screen so fast you can easily miss it (and much faster than the other, male, lovers), is Ivy. Let’s give it but take it all back real fast and never mention it again LGBT representation? Check! So, yeah, the film tries to play all modern and positive by having LGBT characters, but they just can’t bring themselves to commit to them or portray them in a positive or non-stereotypical fashion. Oh, yes, and in the sequence where Harley lays out Zsasz’s “grievances” against her, one that flashes by is “I have a vagina.” Because all gay men despise anyone with a vagina and hate the very idea of female genitals because all gay people are never actually three-dimensional real people with real wants, needs, and motivation, but are about nothing, nothing, but what they do with their genitalia. Yes, in a film released at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century, it’s really that bad.
Then there’s the other sub-text in the film: Men are all dicks. No matter how hard Montoya works and all the crimes she solves, she never gets promoted because her male boss steals all the credit. Harley claims her landlord, who owns the Chinese restaurant she lives above, is “the only person in town” who cares for her. He then sells her out for “enough money to open a better restaurant.” And, ummmm, yeah, those are basically the only male characters in the film aside from the Big Bads, innumerable faceless thugs, and the background scenery. Wait! There’s the guy who makes her egg sandwiches who, apparently, survives without betraying her because she ends the film eating one. Woohoo! One decent guy in Harley’s entire universe. Apparently, the film makers decided to check the, “Let’s pander blatantly to women’s grievances against men,” box forgetting that a large portion of their target audience is… checks notes… men!
Oh, yeah, this film is rated R, because, thanks to Deadpool, comics film makers have realized you can sell a lot of tickets to an R-rated film. What makes it R? Well, they say “fuck” a lot. I mean a LOT. I mean, I’m from New York and we use fuck as incidental punctuation, but even I thought it was excessive. Then there is Sionis. It seems it’s not enough that he’s a serial killer, but he has Zsasz slice the faces off his victims and wave them around as his preferred method of murder. On the other hand, it’s not R enough to actually show you the victims’ faces after the skin has been sliced off, so not as R as, say, a Saw film. There is also the gratuitous sexual assault scene. At one point Sionis, in his club, starts to think some rando in the background is laughing at him, so he makes her get up on a table and dance, then forces her boy-friend to cut her dress off with a steak knife. Again, not so R-rated that she gets topless or even down to her lingerie (the boyfriend just kind of cuts a shoulder strap and she covers her bra-covered boob with her am), and the scene is very short. But I can’t get past the idea that it would have been very easy to show how evil and crazy Sionis is (maybe the face slicing thing... just blue skying some ideas here) without a scene of random violent sexual assault. It’s pretty brutal and would all but certainly be triggering for anyone who has ever been similarly assaulted or worse. The scene does not belong in a comic book movie. Seriously, though, with a few minor tweaks, this could easily have been a PG-13 movie. If American censors didn’t have such a hard-on for the word fuck (if they were as liberal as, say, the BBC is about television), cutting about three minutes of pretty pointless and definitely unnecessary-to-the-plot violence would lose the film’s R-rating, entirely. The film’s battles, being the sort of gymnastic pseudo-martial arts and gunfire that never actually hits anyone, would easily pass muster in PG-13. Kind of points out that the film makers were, as with so much of this film, doing little more than ticking off boxes to achieve an effect, rather than actually working to make a solid, quality film.
OK, back to the John Wick thing. This film could easily have been a Harley Quin stand-alone film; conversely, this could easily have been a John Wick film. You’d just have to lose the Harley-isms and Huntress and every other character would just blend right in. There was no reason at all to bring in the rest of the Birds, except that they were in the title of the film. Look, aside from Canary, who several times rescues Harley, the “Birds” never actually get together until the third act when they are called on to beat up a huge number of bad guys in an amusement park. OK, fine. But we have already seen Harley, single-handedly, beat up a police station full of cops, followed by a cell-block full of bad guys she accidentally releases, followed by a warehouse full of bikers. It’s like 40-50 guys, all within about 15 minutes. It’s clear she has no need of back-up. It’s clear that the ONLY reason so many of those faceless bad guys are there at the end is to give the “Birds” a reason to be there. The Birds are even abandoned when Harley goes off alone to blow up Sionis and rescue Cassandra. Since they have almost no character development, and no character arcs to speak of, we easily could have lost the Birds, entirely, or at least the idea of them, and still had the same basic movie. The film even makes a point, in this “Birds of Prey” origin movie (and hey, can we just have a moratorium on super hero “origin” movies, please? We all know the drill by now) that Harley and Cassandra have no desire to even be in the Birds of Prey; they end the movie by going off to be a team and eat egg sandwiches together. So the film lamely dresses Montoya, Huntress, and Canary in matching shiny blue and silver jump suits and announces they are the three-person ongoing BOP team. WTF? See why this could easily have been a stand-alone Harley movie? Even the film makers seem to think so.
Lastly, the other wildly derivative part of the film is their obvious attempt to make Harley a version of fourth-wall-breaking Deadpool. Not only is Harley the voice-over narrator, but she consistently winks at the audience, addresses them directly (with none of Ryan Reynold’s signature wit), and steps in to rewind the plot when “she” leaves something out, and so on. All things we’ve seen Deapool do, and do far better.
It boils down to my original observation that DC really, really does not actually know how to make movies. I had high hopes for this film because Harley was the highlight of the otherwise pretty awful Suicide Squad. And I just find it incredible that a company that has been writing and producing literally tens of millions of pages of comic book story-telling over the last 85 years, can’t get the job done. If anyone should be able to write a solid comic book movie, it should be DC. Comics is visual story-telling, the most closely-related form of story-telling to the movies, themselves. This should be a no-brainer for a company like DC. (Heck, they even do a decent job in their long-running TV shows and they rule the animated super hero world). But nearly every time they do a live-action movie, they just toss a brick. And when they do get it right, they never seem to learn from the success. I shudder to think how bad Wonder Woman 1984 is going to be. Will Patty Jenkins prove to be another Chris Nolan and turn in a polished, brilliant sequel to her freshman effort? (The presence of an apparently reincarnated Chris Pine makes me worry.) Or will the DC curse send her off to crash and burn as so many others have?
I guess the final realization for me, in regards to BOP(AFEOHQ), is that I am a definite Harley Quinn comics fan. I like Margot Robbie as a highly capable actor. But by the end of this movie, after listening to Harley’s incessant flat nasal squeak for 109 minutes, I kind of never want to hear Harley Quinn’s voice ever again.
Oh, and if you made it this far and you haven’t seen the movie yet, Bruce the Hyena does not die. I hate it when they kill the dog.
Was that another John Wick reference? Probably.