The saving grace of “Suicide Squad” is now featured in her own movie, “Birds of Prey (and the fantabulous emancipation of Harley Quinn).” The film explores Harley Quinn’s life post-breakup with the Joker. Harley is no longer under his protection and all of her former enemies quickly come out from the shadows to seek revenge.
Harley Quinn’s (Margot Robbie) biggest rivals in the film are Gotham billionaire Roman Sionis, otherwise known as “The Black Mask,” (Ewan McGregor) and his sidekick Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina).
An arrangement is made between Quinn and Sionis that if she delivers him the famous Bertinelli diamond, he would forget his grievances and offer protection from her newly returned enemies. This gets a bit complicated when child pickpocket, Cassandra Cain swallows the famous diamond.
The film had a lot of potential to be great but lost its way in finding a rhythm. It constantly changed between a very serious to comical tone. While a movie can be successful in making comedy out of really dark content, it just felt uncomfortable and off-beat at times.
Roman Sionis is a grown man that resembles a child having a temper-tantrum. The villain was simply irritating and took excessive amounts of screen time with scenes that didn’t add to the storyline. “Birds of Prey,” was intended to be about female empowerment and there was too much focus on Roman and his weird sidekick.
The plot was advertised to the public as Harley Quinn becoming allies with a new mismatched girl gang, consisting of detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), the Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Black Canary (Jurnee Smollet-Bell). Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see this happen until the very end of the movie. The female leads are what made the movie enjoyable. Their characters had very different goals at the beginning of the film but managed to come together with all odds against them. I wish this unexpected alliance would have formed a bit sooner because it was the best part of the film without question.
While the storyline was a bit amiss, Margot Robbie still gives another flawless performance of her iconic interpretation of Harley Quinn. She is charismatic and reprises her role exactly how we remember her from “Suicide Squad.”
The highlight of the movie was a beautifully choreographed fight scene that took place in an abandoned amusement park, nicknamed “The Boobytrap.” One take away from the film is that if you plan on going up against a Gotham billionaire, bring a pair of roller skates.
“Birds of Prey,” was released Feb. 7 and is now playing in theatres.