Birds of Prey

There’s an old adage that sug­gests in an urban area, you’re nev­er more than six feet away from a rat. When it comes to movies, it seems you’re nev­er more than six months away from anoth­er super­hero film.

Birds of Prey is the first of five such films sched­uled for release in 2020 (The New Mutants, Black Wid­ow, Mor­bius and The Eter­nals are set to fol­low), and giv­en the inaus­pi­cious ori­gins of Mar­got Robbie’s Harley Quinn in David Ayers’ woe­ful Sui­cide Squad, the prospect of a full-length out­ing for her motor-mouthed chaos maven wasn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly appeal­ing. It’s a relief, then, that Cathy Yan’s pop-punk ode to wom­an­hood rights so many of the DCEU’s wrongs, trad­ing CGI for care­ful­ly chore­o­graphed fight scenes and breath­ing new life into a stag­nant genre.

While Mar­vel seem con­tent to rest on their lau­rels as the titans of super­hero cin­e­ma, DC’s string of flops means that neces­si­ty is the moth­er of inven­tion. In hand­ing the keys to one of their mar­quee char­ac­ters to a rel­a­tive­ly unknown film­mak­er, Warn­er Bros and DC have struck gold, prov­ing that there’s no ratio­nale behind exclud­ing women from these rar­i­fied spaces. To that end, kudos must go to Mar­got Rob­bie, who used her star pow­er to secure a large­ly female cre­ative team.

After break­ing up with her long-term boyfriend Jok­er, Harley Quinn (Rob­bie) decides to strike out on her own, though quick­ly realis­es life’s tough for a gal on the town, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the ene­mies she made while under the Clown Prince of Crime’s pro­tec­tion. With a price on her head, set by show­boat­ing psy­chopath Roman Sio­n­is (Ewan McGre­gor), she’s forced to form new alliances with fel­low wronged women Dinah Lance/​Black Canary (Jurnee Smol­lett-Bell), Hele­na Bertinelli/​Huntress (Mary Eliz­a­beth Win­stead) and Detec­tive Renne Mon­toya (Rosie Perez).

So Quinn does what so many women do after a bad break-up: she cuts her hair, gets drunk, gets very messy, and lives life for her­self for the first time in a long time. In Sui­cide Squad her whole iden­ti­ty revolved around her rela­tion­ship with Jared Leto’s faux emo Jok­er, but he she’s off the leash, look­ing out for num­ber one and learn­ing some harsh life lessons about the things you can and can’t run from in the process. Deal­ing with trau­ma, abuse and the very real threat of male vio­lence through a super­hero lens, it’s the clos­est any­one has come to trans­lat­ing the Tech­ni­colour ener­gy of actu­al comics onto the screen for a long time.

Unlike Sui­cide Squad, the entire cast seems to be hav­ing a ball: Robbie’s affin­i­ty for her char­ac­ter is infec­tious; Rosie Perez gets her best role in years as the hard­boiled cop on Quinn’s tail; and Win­stead is a delight as the social­ly awk­ward assas­sin who’s spent her whole adult life plot­ting revenge. The film also ben­e­fits from two first-rate vil­lains in the form of Ewan McGre­gor as a delight­ful­ly unhinged trusta­far­i­an brat and Chris Messi­na as his bleach blonde bizarro lackey.

They make for wor­thy oppo­nents to Quinn, delight­ing in vio­lence for the sake of vio­lence but cru­cial­ly ground­ed in real­i­ty – indeed, with only one actu­al super­pow­er on show, a good deal of empha­sis is placed on the metic­u­lous­ly staged fights scenes; the pick of the bunch involv­ing roller skates and an aban­doned amuse­ment park. (It’s like­ly that the film’s sec­ond unit direc­tor Chad Sta­hel­s­ki, one of the mas­ter­minds behind John Wick, had more than a lit­tle to do with this.)

Rather than the paint-by-num­bers girl pow­er of Cap­tain Mar­vel and Won­der Woman, Birds of Prey presents flawed, mul­ti-faceted women as more than an after­thought in male-dri­ven nar­ra­tives. Quinn’s inces­sant nar­ra­tion dis­tracts a lit­tle from the sto­ry, but oth­er­wise this is a wel­come ton­ic to the grim­dark macho worlds of Bat­man v Super­man and Jus­tice League.