Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

Our Review

The full title is Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), and the movie mostly lives up to that subtitle: this is Harley’s breakup picture, a neon splattered romp about a woman setting off on her own after dumping the Joker. Margot Robbie remains a perfect piece of casting, and freed from the 2016 film’s scissors she gets to be funny, feral, and weirdly sympathetic. Her narration keeps rewinding the story for effect, and the device is sloppy in a way that mostly fits the character.

Cathy Yan stages action with pops of color and a few genuinely clever sequences, including a police station shootout that Harley tailors with a firecracker trail. The ensemble around her is hit or miss: Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Huntress gets one great bit, Jurnee Smollett’s Black Canary is underwritten until suddenly she is not, and Ewan McGregor clearly had a blast playing Roman Sionis as a preening crime lord diva.

It tanked in theaters on the back of confused marketing, and that is a shame, because as a Saturday night streaming pick it goes down easy. Our score: 6/10. Messy, loud, and more fun than its reputation suggests.