5 / 10
Official trailer
Birds of Prey, formally titled Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), is the Harley Quinn solo film between Suicide Squad (2016) and The Suicide Squad (2021). Cathy Yan directed in her major studio debut. Christina Hodson wrote. Margot Robbie returns as Harley Quinn. Ewan McGregor plays Roman Sionis. Jurnee Smollett plays Black Canary. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the Huntress. Rosie Perez plays Detective Renee Montoya. Ella Jay Basco plays Cassandra Cain, a young pickpocket.
The plot involves Harley’s post-Joker independence, a stolen diamond, and the loose coalition of women who come together to defeat Sionis.
I come away from Birds of Prey split down the middle. There’s a sharp, nasty little action film buried in here, with McGregor chewing through every scene and a funhouse brawl I’d happily watch again, and it keeps getting smothered by a script that can’t decide whose movie it is. I enjoy about a third of it and shrug at the rest, and a 5 feels about right.
The film made approximately two hundred and one million dollars worldwide on a one hundred million dollar budget. The studio considered the commercial performance disappointing. The post-release re-titling to Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey was an admission that the original title had failed in the market.
The film has fans and serious craft criticism. It’s on the Woke Disasters list because its framing and several specific creative choices made it the clearest 2020 case of a DC film built around feminist branding instead of around the property’s traditional audience.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
The “Emancipation” in the title is the film’s thesis.
Harley has left the Joker. The film’s argument is that her time with the Joker was an abusive relationship and the rest of the film is her recovery and self-actualization. The framing treats Joker fans as people who have romanticized abuse. The audience that loved the Harley-Joker comic book dynamic was being told the dynamic was the problem and the film was the corrective.
The film’s male characters reinforce the framing. Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor) is the antagonist, and the script codes him as an effeminate menace. His relationship with Zsasz (Chris Messina) is staged with romantic undertones the film treats as villain-coded. The script’s male characters are otherwise henchmen or victims. The single male law enforcement officer Montoya works with is dismissive. There’s no male character in the film the script treats as morally serious or capable. The male presence in Gotham is uniformly bad.
The female characters have to band together because the male world has nothing to offer them.
The Cassandra Cain race-swap is the comic-fan controversy. In DC comics, Cassandra Cain is among the most prominent Asian-American characters and a fan-favorite Batgirl in her own right.
The film cast Ella Jay Basco, who’s half-Filipino, but rewrote the character as a Latina pickpocket with no martial arts background. It stripped the comic character of her defining traits (Asian identity, elite fighting skill, complex assassin backstory) and replaced them with a generic street kid role. The change was framed as making the character “accessible.”
Comic readers read it as the property discarding its most distinctive Asian-American superhero in favor of a forgettable supporting child.
I’m with them. Cassandra Cain’s whole appeal is a kid with an assassin’s past who can out-fight anyone in the room, and the film turned her into a generic pickpocket. That’s a waste of a great character and the film’s worst decision.
For Writers
A film that markets itself as diverse representation while erasing one of its source material’s most prominent diverse characters has structured a contradiction. Birds of Prey’s Cassandra Cain handling positioned the film as progressive while throwing away the comics’ actual progressive character. The lesson is that diversity claims have to survive contact with the source material. If your “diverse” adaptation removes the diversity that already existed, the audience reads the inconsistency. The marketing fights the work.
The Title Tax
The original title (Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is the film’s most-discussed pre-release miscalculation. The title tried to communicate that this was both a Harley Quinn solo film and a Birds of Prey team-up. The result was a title audiences couldn’t remember accurately and couldn’t search for easily. The post-release retitling to Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey was the studio admitting the original title hadn’t worked.
The title problem is diagnostic of the larger script problem.
The film can’t decide between a Harley Quinn solo movie and a Birds of Prey team-up. Black Canary, Huntress, Montoya and Cassandra Cain are introduced one at a time and only converge in the third act, and each of them could carry her own film. I’d have cut the scattered backstories and let the team meet by the midpoint. As it stands, Harley’s story and the team’s story fight over the runtime and both lose.
For Writers
A title that has to explain what kind of film it is signals a film unclear about what kind of film it is. Birds of Prey’s marketing struggled because the production struggled. The lesson is that titles report the work’s confidence. Confident work has titles that work. Confused work has titles that hedge. If you can’t title your film without a parenthetical, the parenthetical is information about the film you haven’t yet finished making.
Ewan McGregor
McGregor is the reason I’d sit through this again.
He plays Sionis as a wealthy mob boss whose theatrical insecurity drives his violence, and he’s more committed than the script deserves. The scenes where his temper flips from charm to cruelty mid-sentence are the strangest and best things in the picture. The funhouse fight in the third act, choreographed by Chad Stahelski’s 87Eleven team, is the other clear high.
McGregor’s commitment also exposes the script’s queer-coded villainy. The script wants Sionis to be threatening and the script wants him to be queer-coded. The combination produces a character whose villainy and effeminacy are presented as the same thing. McGregor is doing strong work inside material that uses his character’s coded queerness as a marker of his evil.
The film is otherwise positioning itself as a progressive feminist work. The contradiction is visible. The film’s defenders have written about it for six years.
For Writers
A film that codes its villain through traits the film at the same time claims to celebrate has structured an internal contradiction. Birds of Prey codes Roman Sionis as queer to mark his villainy while positioning itself as progressive on queer issues. The lesson is that coded characterization should be consistent with the work’s stated values. Audiences read coding. If your villain’s bad qualities are also the qualities your work claims to embrace, the work is making an argument it doesn’t realize it’s making.
Craft Note
The funhouse third-act fight choreographed by 87Eleven Action Design is the film’s craft peak and one of the strongest individual fight sequences in 2020s superhero cinema. The choreography uses sustained takes that let the audience follow the spatial geography of the fight. Margot Robbie does serious physical work. The funhouse mirrors and shifting platforms are used as actual choreographic elements instead of as visual decoration. Chad Stahelski’s team had given the production its strongest material.
The fight’s craft level exceeds the surrounding script’s by a significant margin. The funhouse sequence is what Birds of Prey could have been if the film around its action had matched the action’s commitment.
Is Birds of Prey worth watching?
5/10. Birds of Prey has a committed villain, a funhouse fight that deserves a damn sight better film, and a script that keeps tripping over its own framing and its muddled character coding. McGregor and that fight are why it isn’t lower.
Cassandra Cain is why it isn’t higher, along with a story that never picks a lead. It sits dead center, and dead center is a frustrating place for a movie with this much talent in it.
