電影《猛禽小隊：小丑女大解放》影評：[Film Review] Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

The sole outing of DC Comics’ unhinged, anarchic, baseball bat-wielding villainess Harley Quinn (Robbie), in the aftermath of the breakup with her more prestigiously fêted former partner/mentor the Joker (who understandably is a no-show here in order not to upstage anybody else), certainly a closure is something she seeks first, and casually engenders an explosion of the chemistry plant can do that trick, yet, it also has its less favorable corollary, many a foe now looks for vengeance after Harley loses Mr. J’s protection, not least the Gotham crime lord Roman Sionis (McGregor) aka. Black Mask.

Front-loaded with Harley’s own jacked-up voice-over to narrate the untrustworthy storyline, which temporally jumps back and forth without much signposting (patterning after Marvel’s DEADPOOL, which is a more innovative genre groundbreaker upon its release), BIRDS OF PREY is a messy enterprise that cannot extricate itself from its stock tropes and the jejune comic book contents, with the slo-mo action pieces looking gallingly and tediously derivative and the close-quarter combats so unconvincingly choreographed to crank up the destructive impact of a model-sized girl’s overpowering brawn against those numberless, piteous bozos of the opposite sex, unanimously punch-pulled, tripped, bungled, clobbered or kicked as the ridiculous cannon fodder (if we cannot really buy it), often subjected to less-lethal arms to reduce the gore to the minimum.

Self-parodying references are legion, McGregor’s historic villain mannerism is utterly unimaginative and cringeworthy (culminating in the scene where Roman bullies a female patron in his clip joint, a cameo by Bojana Novakovic, the nearest thing we can obtain from visceral acting in the whole shebang); the psionic power of Dinah Lance aka. Black Canary (Smollett-Bell) is roundly inconsistent with whatever has happened thus far; Rosie Perez’s Renee Montoya is the carbon copy of a wronged detective from any ‘80s bad cop movie, and she duly plays as a one without any inflection, only here she is a middle-aged lesbian, but queer sexuality still achingly remains a taboo in the mainstream superhero universe, only faint homoerotic implications are hinted between Roman and his BFF Victor Zsasz (Messina), moreover, in the face of the waving flag of the coalition of a 「united girl power」, any sexuality (queer or otherwise, proper or otherwise) is left conspicuously untapped.

While Robbie’s reprise of Harley is as looney-tunes as anyone can foresee, with more screen-time to wreak havoc with whoever, whatever standing in her way, than David Ayer’s SUICIDE SQUAD (2016), her bats-crazy schtick palls soon and Quinn's twisted mindset has never been mined into something more socially resonant like in Todd Phillips’ THE JOKER (2019), it is blandly cartoonish, so are every other characters, including the female vigilantes of the titular league, although Winstead makes for a valiant entrance here as the Huntress, if criminally underwritten, and a petite Perez is disproportionally game and square-jawed to play the fair game.

All in all, one shouldn’t forget BIRDS OF PREY is executed by a Chinese-American female director Cathy Yan (her second feature after the less seen debut DEAD PIGS, 2018), and scripted by a female writer Christina Hodson, a high-water mark on the industry’s crusade of gender parity and ethnic inclusivity in all departments, but the sad reality is that it also can be a self-defeating case of haste makes waste, if a film’s harlequin palette andproduction design is the most impressive takeaway out of its 9-digit budget.

referential entries: David Ayer’s SUICIDE SQUAD (2016, 5.7/10); Todd Phillips’ THE JOKER (2019, 8.2/10); Tim Miller’s DEADPOOL (2016, 7.3/10).