Birds of Prey review

Okay, first off, I haven’t seen Sonic the Hedgehog yet, so I’m not going to proclaim an end to the latest stupid Internet fight.

But as far as Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of one Harley Quinn) goes on its own… I’m not sure why that hill is worth dying on against any competition.

A $30 million opening is probably weaker than it deserved, but you do need to take into account how burned audiences felt about Suicide Squad. Or how having Birds of Prey without Barbara Gordon left fans of the comics on the outside looking in.

All that and more were perhaps why, on the Friday of the movie’s third weekend, I was the only person in a 254-seat theater watching the movie.

Despite the order of the title, Birds of Prey is nakedly a Margot Robbie vehicle with the Birds of Prey tacked on. So your enjoyment of the movie is going to depend heavily on how well you liked her interpretation of the character.

The movie deploys Harley Quinn as the (understandably) unreliable narrator as she bumbles her way through a gangland war indirectly created by her getting dumped by the Joker. While the events only take place over a long weekend, it’s a nexus in which a deep bench of Batman Family characters’ lives collide.

This Gordian knot of intertwined characters plays out in a series of out-of-order scenes that get revisited to focus on a different character as Harley organizes her thoughts while telling the story. I thought it was a creative storytelling device, but I struggled to find any other compliment. What REALLY didn’t help is that I watched Knives Out immediately afterward, which does an amazing job of telling its story out-of-sequence with multiple unreliable narrators and revisited scenes.

The action scenes were entertaining enough, and the set designers and cinematographers did their utmost to make them as interesting as possible. But the action nonetheless comes off as perfunctory; as though they’re having a 3-minute fight after the second story beat because the chart says it will maximize audience engagement. The movie just feels more interested in everything that isn’t an action set piece, which is refreshing for a post-MCU comic book movie. But it didn’t result in limiting the movie to only the action it really wanted.

I’m really hoping the tepid reaction doesn’t kill the opportunity for a standalone Birds of Prey movie, but it doesn’t look like any of the current cast emerged as the breakout performance that seal the deal.

Verdict: Flat (2/5). The effort was there, but the whole ended up less than the sum of its parts. Shit happens. Hopefully Wonder Woman 2 will perform to expectations and keep Warner Bros. executives from laying the blame on having a female lead.