[Review] Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey(2020) {6/10}

Directed by Cathy Yan with a screenplay by Christina Hodson, the film stars Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Huntress), Jurnee Smollet (Black Canary), Ewan McGregor (Black Mask), Rosie Perez (Renee Montoya), Chris Messina (Victor Zsasz) and Ella Jay Basco (Cassandra Cain). The film is based on the DC Comics team "Birds of Prey" and is the eighth installment in the DC Extended Universe.

The film follows Harley Quinn's journey after breaking up with the Joker. The unstable and volatile Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) joins forces with a squad of other tough female antiheroes including Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) to take down their common enemy, the villainous Black Mask (Ewan McGregor).

Harley Quinn's "bad girl" empowerment film isn't as good as it thinks it is. This villains-as-vigilantes flick is constantly adjusting and trying to find the right tone but it never strikes the perfect chord. Unlike Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, Wonder Woman, and Joker, which strive to make fully realized and empathetic human beings out of comic book characters and has a constant tone throughout the movie. Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey struggles to find the right tone throughout the movie. It struggles to find the right tone throughout the movie. It attempts to mix Dark irreverence and comedy which works in Deadpool, but it doesn't here. The best thing in the movie are the performances by Ewan McGregor as Black Mask and Chris Messina as Victor Zsaz but are not enough as it leaves the fans wanting more from the duo. The film is unnecessarily Rated-R. In one scene Harley goes into the police station to rescue Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco) and instead of killing the cops, she uses smoke bombs which only acts as an eye candy for the audience. She is a villain but she is shown as an antihero in the movie. Strip away the language, airbrush out of the blood and you have got pretty much the same movie and would have affected it's box office collection in a good way. Black Canary sings "It's a Man's World," which is pretty much the premise of the entire film. The women are empathetic and operate on a sliding scale of good-bad, but all the men are evil, selfish, and/or disappointing. The movie plays at provocation but declines to provoke anything like a thought. Slapping the topical theme of female empowerment on a story that trucks in business as usual violence does not qualify as a game changer.

Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey is now available on Digital and Blu-ray.