For the Birds

Let's just take a moment to acknowledge the obvious: As far as these major studio superhero movies go, the production and cinematography on display in Birds of Prey continues the comparably impressive streak in Warner Bros.' catalogue. It's not as oddly evocative as your Joker, or as operatic as your Batman v Superman - but it is far and away a perfect synthesis of cynical brand tie-in wallpaper and prestige film theatricality. It's a reminder that these cape-man serials, originally on Hollywood's B-list, are now the equivalent of its great musicals events, or its prestige historical and Biblical epics.

It's frankly disappointing, then, when the filmmakers paper over the musical potential they broach. A femdom reproduction of the "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number from Gentlemen Wear Blondes will get short-circuited as just another one of crazy clown lady Harley Quinn's traumatic inserts. A similarly marquee-lit, "POSTMODERN" take on James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" will be utilized primarily as the lounge background noise to star Margot Robbie's incessant prattling. With a full title as twee as, and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, this latest in the canon of pre-overrated comic book event films exudes bemusement in potential rather than fulfillment. The filmmakers can "emancipate" crazy clown lady Harley Quinn from the cage of problematic tropes -- like her abusive ex-boyfriend, star of television and screen The Joker™-- but it can't emancipate any emotion from the hyper-normalized, morbid artifice of the film itself. The production is beautiful, but it's a revolting beauty of the surface, rather than of the emancipated soul.

The movie proper, the actual narrative, is a beyond typical "clusterfuck" ensemble crime fantasy, stacked with a bunch of I.P.-certified randos from the DC comics canon all convening upon a single action agenda, which is the acquisition of a very valuable diamond from a teenage pickpocket for the benefit of a ruthless criminal kingpen who doesn't actually need a costume gimmick but inevitably gets one anyway. The reason for this later rule is that, in modern comic book movies, even if the motivation for a character even having a costume gimmick in the first place is only an expression of their myopia and stupidity, any effect of this is flattened in a universe where that myopia and stupidity is just preternatural to virtually everyone else we see browsing in front of the camera. Screenwriter Christina Hodson and director Cathy Yan choose to double-down on the alienating stupidity, to a nakedly mean-spirited degree, achieving something like Smokin' Aces with lazier character-building and Deadpool-style 4th wall humor.

Its leading lady in a constant, permanent, and explicitly self-pandering address to the audience, Birds of Prey leans hard on cartoon logic, even opening with an animated synopsis of Harley's life. But the filmmakers, like most of Hollywood's all too amenable promoters of the new cycle of adults only kids entertainment, can only posit "cartoon logic" in terms of a cynical infantilism, rather than something that disturbs convention or breaks boundaries of verisimilitude in live action cinema of any genre. No, Margot Robbie's star-vehicle performance is too totalitarian for anything that would truly scandalize major studio blockbusters. Quinn could literally pitch Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! and it wouldn't be far off. It adds up to a compounding series of willful alienations, culminating in the titular "Birds of Prey" themselves being contrived as an afterthought, "pitched" to us by Margot Robbie in character. The movie called Birds of Prey is, quite literally, a two-hour trailer for an actual Birds of Prey movie. Alienation compounded on alienation, the film represents the new era of Hollywood prestige films as its never been prettier, but sickness behind all those decadent airs is unmistakable.