Birds of Prey Review: Men are Evil the Motion Picture

This one breaks my heart, I really wanted this one to be good, I wasn't expecting to with everything that we've seen about it.

Before I get into the review there's a few quotes that need posting first from one Margot Robbie:

Margot Robbie, the star and producer of new DC movie Birds of Prey says the new Harley Quinn standalone movie is setting an example for how to approach equality in filmmaking.

Speaking to Yahoo, Robbie said that the lack of diversity behind the camera in the film industry is “embarrassing” and that Hollywood needs to take Birds of Prey’s lead in making a concerted effort to put women in those roles.

“First and foremost, the best person gets the job, Cathy [Yan] was the best person for the job,” said Robbie on the film’s director, “but I think it’s important to make more of an effort to seek out the females for those roles, because the statistics are embarrassing and disgraceful, and not where they should be. And if we don’t actually take action, it’s never going to change.”

So let's talk about this bolded quote for a second. In her efforts to advocate for more women behind the camera in big Hollywood movies Margot Robbie says that the best person should get the job & Cathy Yan the director of Birds of Prey or the original director at least, more on that in a minute, was the best person to make this movie. Bear in mind it's been no secret that the studio was so unhappy with the movie Cathy Yan delivered that they had to bring in Chad Stahelski from the John Wick franchise to helm reshoots in an attempt to save the film. Very strange that they would feel the need to do that if Cathy Yan was 'the best person for the job' isn't it.

I'm sorry Margot but someone doesn't get to be 'the best person for the job' just because they have lady parts. Hiring based on gender rather than merit is a recipe for failure.  So obviously this line from Margot Robbie is nothing, but political spin to give her female director more credit which judging by the final product she probably didn't deserve in the first place & if she's making such obviously bullshit statements about stuff like this just because it fits her narrative & the narrative of the film as I'll explain in a minute. Why should we believe anything that comes out of her mouth in regards to this movie. For example if Margot Robbie said this movie was 'good' why should we believe her? Let me answer that question for you. We shouldn't.

Then we've got all these comments made by Ewan McGregor recently & Ewan I love you dude I hope you get to play Obi-Wan again I really do, but you're not doing yourself any favors with this crap. Ewan has been going on and on about how proud he is to be in a feminist movie, how Birds of Prey is all about misogyny & women taking to those evil men as payback for all the horrors & indignities that women have to suffer from everyday & he was so excited to play the face of that misogyny as the villain of this movie. So basically on the press tour for this thing we have a male feminist virtue signaling about how hard it is to be a woman & evil men are. Based on these comments & his very obvious political leanings do you think that Ewan McGregor was going to play this character as a real person. Someone who might be bad, but is still never-the-less a complex three-dimensional human being with understandable motivations or do you think he's going to play this character as a cardboard cutout monster who comes off as the living embodiment of feminist propaganda & exists only to be a political sock puppet whose sole job is to ask how high every time Margot Robbie says jump. I assure you he's definitely one of those things in this movie. Which one do you think he is?

And then there was the absolute shit show of a marketing campaign which prove that even the studio seemed to have no idea what kind of movie this was. Putting out trailer after trailer, promo after promo with each one looking like it was advertising a completely different film with a completely different tone and not one of them looking like it was meant to appeal to the actual fans of the Birds of Prey IP & having seen it now I can definitely confirm that this was all a desperate attempt on the studio's part to conceal the massive trash fire they had on their hands here by trying to appeal to everyone they possibly could except for the people the movie should have been made for in the first place, the fans.

So with all that being said what we have with Birds of Prey is an insufferable mess of a movie that is way way more interested in screaming about how awesome Harley Quinn is and how horrible men are than it is with doing justice to any of these characters or the source material & when you consider that the biggest demographic that usually go to see movies like this are men who are fans of the source material I have to ask: Who the hell was this movie made for? It wasn't made for anyone who likes these characters & oh boy I'll have more to say about that in just a minute. And with the less than stellar turnout on opening night at my theater, 5 people including myself, despite what Margot Robbie would have you believe I would question if this was made for women. Anyway that's my rant now let's talk about the movie itself.

What the fuck was this? What the fuck did I just watch? How can I describe the experience I just had after seeing this thing? Imagine going to see a movie that you thought was about a popular group of characters from the comics, but once the movie starts those characters are all huddled away in a dark corner somewhere while the actress who plays the character that probably should have been the villain of this movie spends 2 straight hours under a spotlight masturbating to a giant picture of herself while surrounded by hordes of people with no self-respect to speak of who worship the ground she walks on & shower her with applause. That's kind of what this movie is.

Birds of Prey is simultaneously 2 things: it is such a baffling egregious Margot Robbie ego stroke that I walked in a fan of Margot Robbie & Harley Quinn and walked out absolutely sick of both of them & it's also without question the most blatantly, shamelessly, vehemently, anti-male movie I've seen since Ghostbusters 2016. In fact I would argue that it might be even more politically driven than Ghostbusters 2016 because at least that movie had Chris Hemsworth as Kevin & I hated that character, but even though Kevin was so cartoonishly stupid you had to wonder how he didn't forget to breathe in and out, at least he seemed to be a decent guy & that's more than I could say for Birds of Prey.

Every male character in this movie is a complete asshole. Every. Single. One. If you have a penis you are evil, that's their mentality & oh my god does this movie feel like it was made by a woman with an axe to grind because not only are all men evil, but it absolutely relishes in punishing them for this non-stop. I have never seen so many nut shots in my life. Out of every male character in Birds of Prey I would say a good 50% of them if not more get kicked in the balls at some point. You could make a drinking game out of it for Christ's sake. It even takes a page out of Captain Marvel's book & goes one step further with it. You know that deleted scene from Captain Marvel where a guy makes a rude comment about Carol so she threatens to rip his arm off & then steals his bike? Well Birds of Prey has a scene like that. A guy makes a rude comment to Harley & to punish this reprehensible man for his off-color remark Harley breaks his legs, both of them & it's meant to be this big you go girl moment, but actually it's just really disturbing because Harley's response was so horrifyingly disproportionate to the insult & we're all just supposed to cheer because it's a woman taking revenge on a man who according to Harley totally deserved it because in this movie all men are scum.

No joke it pushes this line of thinking so damn hard it honestly feels like the movie is completely out of touch with reality. You know that clip in the trailers of Harley blowing up Axis Chemicals? Well in the movie this scene is supposed to signify Harley getting over the Joker after their breakup & that might have been ok if it were presented differently except she blows up the entire plant which probably had people inside so this would be arson & murder at the very least, but the movie doesn't even consider details like that because it's too busy framing this as a triumphant moment where Harley is affirming herself as a strong independent who don't need no man, take that patriarchy.

Now I'm not saying that Harley had to be some perfect little angel in this movie god forbid, but she does need to be a likable character that the audience wants to spend time with, but when she's doing stuff like this being so bafflingly narcissistic that she doesn't care or even notice when the people around her live or die. How the hell are we supposed to root for her? I have no idea. And while we're on the subject of the Joker the timing of this movie's release could not have been worse. Joker has become one of the most successful movies of all time, & now here's Birds of Prey going out of it's way to delegitimize the Joker, not that version of the Joker, but still informing us that it was actually Harley who was the brains behind his infamous schemes. I don't want to say it's unintentionally funny because frankly nothing about this movie gets any laughs intentional or otherwise, but when Joker is sweeping awards season & this movie has Harley using Mr J's face as a dartboard, it really comes off as the people behind this movie just being incredibly bitter, petty & spiteful.

If you think I'm joking about that I'm really not. Nothing about this movie was made with good intentions starting with how they portray the characters. I honestly think that whatever clown wrote this thing has never even looked at a comic book before.

If You're in any way a fan of Black Bat/Orphan/Cassandra Cain whatever name you know her as, this movie will piss you off. She's not a fighter, she doesn't have her reading body language skills, she talks like a totally normal girl because she is a totally normal girl. She's some random teenage pickpocket whose only resemblance to her comics counterpart is her fucking name. She has no agency, no resemblance to the character from the comics that people actually like. They didn't give one shit about Cassie they just wanted an Asian girl in the cast for woke points & once they had her they didn't care about her character in the slightest she's just there to be a plot device & a hanger-on for Harley to lug around & that's it.

I wish I could say that's the only crime against these characters, but it's not. Nobodies recognizable, nobody looks like they're supposed to look, nobody wears their costume from the comics or even something that resembles their costume from the comics. The only one that looks even the tiniest bit comics accurate is Huntress because kind of had a similar color scheme with black & a little purple in her outfit, but it's unfortunate it was her because Huntress is barely in this movie. They kind of toy with showing the bare bones of her origin & if they'd expanded upon that & treated her like they gave a shit they might have had something with Huntress, but she's on screen for maybe 15-20 minutes & I guess that makes a weird kind of sense because she was the least offensive character in the main cast despite her taking a weird pot shot at Green Arrow in one scene which felt unnecessary. So it's only fitting that we see her as little as possible.

Black Canary is no better she doesn't look anything like the character & I don't mean because of the race bending either, the outfit is wrong, she never wears the fishnets, she does have the canary cry and she uses it once & all it does is create a bunch of plot holes because you instantly ask yourself why the hell she didn't do that earlier because there were multiple times when it would have been extremely useful & she never bothered with it.

Renee Montoya/The Question has the most screen time outside of Harley, but it's not time well-spent. I think this version of Montoya would have been ok in a better movie, but most of her scenes felt like they were only there to demonstrate how evil men are. She got screwed over for a promotion by a man, she's stuck with an idiot man for a partner & tons of asshole male co-workers. It gets old really, really fast.

Black Mask. Look Ewan McGregor probably gives the best performance in the film, but he's not playing an actual character. He's there to be the face of misogyny which means his only role in the story is to hate women & be an asshole to Harley because the movie wants to vilify men as much as humanly possible

And then there's Harley Quinn. This movie is a prime example of the dangers of giving an actor too much power & control over a film. Just because actors may be creative people doesn't mean they necessarily know what works best for a movie storytelling wise especially when they can't leave their egos at home. I'll give Margot Robbie this much she's still good as Harley, she's front & center for this entire movie, she gives an incredibly high energy performance. She maintains that energy level throughout the whole thing & that was impressive, but it also backfires on her because when you do that you're putting Harley & all her manic zaniness under a magnifying glass & without some kind of down to earth element to keep her grounded in some way, all of her quirks that were charming in Suicide Squad & one of the best parts about that movie, very quickly become tiresome & grating.

I got very impatient with this movie, as charming as Margot is as Harley I can only take so much & by the end I was counting the minutes on my phone just waiting for the damn thing to be over. It also doesn't help that Margo bless her heart is just not a comedian. She might think she's funny & the movie definitely thinks she's hysterical, but she's really not, at least not here. Honestly I found Huntress funnier than Harley & I don't think Huntress was intended to be funny, but Mary Elizabeth Winstead just had that natural comedic timing that everyone else including the star of this 'comedic action film' was lacking & the fact that apparently no one on the production had the guts to tell Robbie this speaks volumes about her just having way too much power in this situation & I wouldn't have even had a problem with that if the movie had been good, but it's just not.

I hate to say it, but Robbie's ego casts a long shadow over this project. She said somewhere that she wanted to use this movie as a vehicle to introduce new female DC characters, but if that was her goal she did a piss-poor job. None of the BoP are represented even remotely well despite the actors being game for the most part. Huntress only has a handful of lines in the whole movie & all of them are very, very distant second to the Harley Quinn show. So distant that you really have to wonder what they're even doing here because you honestly could have swapped them out with any other street-level DC characters & wound up with the same movie. The film stresses so much how these women are all in Harley's shadow all the way down to the wardrobe. Huntress, Canary, Cassie, Montoya none of them have signature look, they're all wearing dark drab colors or regular street clothes so you'd struggle to even pick them out of a crowd & then here's Harley who's all bright & colorful and animated standing in front of everybody as if the whole thing was intentionally designed to have Harley steal all the attention away from the characters that Robbie claims she wanted to introduce.

Why would you introduce them in such a way that makes them complete afterthoughts when compared to your character? Why would you introduce them such a way that utterly disregards everything that made these characters popular in the first place? Because Margot didn't care about those characters, Margot didn't care about the BoP & filmmakers obviously didn't either. They wanted a Harley Quinn vehicle that showed how super amazing & badass Harley is & how evil & despicable men are. Well they sure as hell accomplished that much. It's just too bad it didn't make for a good movie.

Something else that didn't make for a good movie was the story & the direction. The story is completely run-of-the-mill there's no creativity here at all. A lot of it feels very hapharzardly slapped together giving the impression that it was probably re-edited several times. Reference Harley's Marilyn Monroe dream sequence that comes right the hell out of nowhere, doesn't serve any kind of purpose & seem to be a holdover from the previous cut of the film that the director couldn't bring herself to get rid of. There are scenes of Harley & Cassie going grocery shopping & lounging in Harley's apartment watching cartoons & eating cereal just drags the pacing to a screeching halt. There's also this very strange subplot about Harley really wanting to eat an egg sandwich & being really upset when she can't eat an egg sandwhich, that made the final cut somehow, because egg sandwiches are funny. Oh yeah another great call by Cathy Yan right there.

Right person for the job my ass. She might have been fine as director in a different type of movie, but it's painfully obvious that she was in way over her head here. You'd never know movie took place in Gotham City. It looks like any random-ass town on Earth. No genuine atmosphere whatsoever & the entire movie feels weirdly small-scale considering the budget they had. I don't know where all the money went, but my guess would be that they blew it on hiring Chad Stahelski to reshoot the action scenes, not all the action scenes though. There's a pretty stark contrast between the sequences obviously shot by Stahelski & the ones that weren't. One minute you've got fight scenes that are fast-paced kinetic, very tight, well performed, well choreographed & generally a lot of fun & the next you've got shit like Huntress throwing these ridiculous phantom punches at a stuntman that don't even come close to connecting then she walks away & the stuntman just sits right back up & rolls out of the frame, absolutely embarrassing. At least the Stahelski action scenes are one positive you can take away for this & thank God for that because the rest of the movie is actually pretty boring.

You'd be surprised how much the story drags at times due in no small part to the fact that anyone who's not Harley is written to be so uninteresting. Ewan McGregor's chewing a lot of scenery & seems to be enjoying himself, but his part is so transparently written he might as well have had 'men suck' tattooed across his forehead. The only one I kind of enjoyed was Mary Elizabeth Winstead who was able to make a brief impression as Huntress despite a very underwritten part & very little screen time, but she's not in the movie long enough to do anything more than that. 90% of this thing is completely reliant on Harley to carry it rather than the story or any of the other characters, but once Harley's shtick starts to wear thin which happens pretty early on the film becomes a slog to get through & only gets buoyed temporarily during those all too brief Chad Stahelski action scenes.

It throws away one of the only stories worth following up on from Suicide Squad that being Harley & Joker being reunited in favor of turning Harley into a girl power fuck yeah feminist ideologue & delivering which shits on the Joker & anyone else with a penis for that matter and is more concerned with demonizing & punishing men and putting Harley up on a pedestal than it is with telling a good story or giving a proper introduction to the team of characters the freakin movie is named after &  the end result is a grating, patronizing, unfunny, mean-spirited, terribly written, politically driven ego stroke that feels a lot longer than it actually is, looks a lot cheaper than it probably was, overdoses on one of DC's most popular female characters so much that she quickly becomes annoying, will most likely just infuriate anyone who's actually a fan of these characters & instead of enticing moviegoers to want to see more of Harley, Cassie & the Birds of Prey only succeeds in blinding those same fans with the spotlight shining out of Margot Robbie's asshole. Congrat-a-fuckin-lations. And it ends on semi-sequel bait for a Birds of Prey spin-off movie, but I don't know who the hell would want to see one after this.

You spent the entire film making these characters look like second-class citizens who are only there to occupy the screen while Margot Robbie was at the craft service table & now we're supposed to want to see them in their own movie? That's not how this shit works. You know why everyone was asking for a Black Widow solo movie for years? It's because when Black Widow appeared in the other MCU movies she was really cool & she fucking mattered. The Birds of Prey don't matter in this movie. At the end of the day the only one who really matters is Harley.

So to finally answer of who is this movie made for. It wasn't made for the target demographic. It wasn't made for men. In my view it wasn't made for women either, not any woman with a brain anyway. It sure as hell wasn't made for fans of these characters. It was made for Margot Robbie. This movie was really just about Margot Robbie's ego taking on a life of it's own & the best thing that could happen to her at this point is this movie crashing & burning giving her a huge reality check because if Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of one Harley Quinn is any indication that reality check is desperately needed.

If Margot really wanted to make a case for more women behind the camera & in positions of power in Hollywood then she accomplished the exact opposite. The next time you set out to do that Margot just try to deliver a good movie because this one absolutely sucks.