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Harley Quinn and the Joker have broken up, and it’s now time for her to take charge back with her newfound identity – as the slightly deranged, mischievously show-stopping character she was meant to be. Director Cathy Yan’s bold and dazzling take on the D.C. Extended Universe injects a rainbow of eye-popping colours and gleeful fun into this Suicide Squad (David Ayer, 2016) spinoff, and in its vivacious, silly glory – it’s never felt so right.
Leaving any sort of trace of Ayer’s critically disastrous film behind, the main element brought forward from Birds of Prey’s loose predecessor is Harley Quinn’s relationship with Joker – which made her destructive antics so deliciously immune. But the honeymoon period is over, and so is any hint of paint-by-numbers, yawn-inducing filmmaking. The title, inclusive of the perhaps ridiculously elongated parenthesis (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), echoes the film’s screwy nature – though really, in the best way: it’s Harley’s time to become her own saviour – with all the messy chaos that comes with her galvanising independence.
After very publicly blowing up the toxic processing plant that turned her from PhD psychiatrist to unhinged villain, Harley’s been made a target of all those she wronged, primarily Black Mask (Ewan McGregor), who is after a 30-carat diamond that’s key to unlocking the fortunes and control of Gotham City. But getting to the stone isn’t made easy for the eye-liner wearing criminal and his right-hand man (Chris Messina). At least, not with Harley, Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) and young teen, Cassanda Cain (Ella Jay Basco) there to complicate matters.
Quite miraculously, Yan’s stylistic, refreshing vision paired with Christina Hodson’s hilariously buoyant script keeps all her characters and pieces in place in light, zesty fashion. The jumpy flashback structure brings vibrant visuals to the fore, with the frequent animation and use of freeze-frames adding a cartoonish, energetic feel to the film’s unique tonal flair. But the editing also offers the proper time to flesh out each member of Harley’s future anti-hero girl gang, giving snippets of their background stories as they’re placed in the context of another scene. Though the focus is very much on Harley (who provides some of the film’s more droll, self-aware voiceover narration), Hodson’s writing smartly brings these moving parts together, which is excitingly and unpredictably paced.
In fact, that’s one of Birds of Prey’s best and most ambitious traits: it follows through with its bursting desire to creatively shake things up in a tired superhero/comic book genre. Wearing shirts like “I Shaved My Balls For This”, Margot Robbie’s Harley, as the star performance of Suicide Squad, is given full rein here – she leans into her perturbed quirkiness, that’s delightfully childish, and sometimes even, wittingly insightful too.
All of these women are underestimated by, and thus seen as hopeless without, their masters, which, means it’s all the more thrilling when the brilliantly choreographed, kickass action sequences prove exactly the opposite. A standout scene sees Matthew Libatique’s cinematography capture Harley in a drenched prison cell, with the sprinklers on and slippery concrete surfaces, sliding beneath bodies and cracking others. In other moments, it’s slow-motion rubber bullets bouncing off faces and glitter flying into the air. It’s what you might call a fantabulous sight.
