Birds of Prey - Review Thread

This is one of the more and yet least surprising box office bombs in recent memory.

This should have been called "Harley Quinn" or "Harley" would have worked waaayyy better. 

Naming it "Birds of Prey" is laughable at best. 

What if Deadpool was called "X-Men: Deadpool" or something stupid. 

The title alone hurt the movie. But damn.

Did I enjoy this movie. I liked it more than "Joker" at least this movie is fun and not dreadful or depressing.

They changed the title after it had been released?

When I saw it the title card on the actual movie was still intact, so as far as I'm concerned that's still the title.

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)(2/12/2020)

I’m not really sure how savvy general audiences are to these things but I could smell weakness coming off the “Birds of Prey” movie. The studio was certainly treating it like it was going to be bad; it had a noticeably light advertising budget and reviews were embargoed on it right up until the day before release, something studios only do when they know they’ve got a bust on their hands, but when those reviews did start streaming in they were surprisingly positive. You can envision a world where this could have become a hit if it had been finessed a little better. I think part of the problem with the film in general is that it’s sort of a sequel to Suicide Squad in that it’s using the Harley Quinn character from that movie but neither the studio nor the filmmakers are really sure if anyone liked that movie given that it made a lot of money but it’s sort of reviled by the chattering class so they weren’t sure whether to advertise it as a follow up to that or to sell it as a spin-off, or as a new franchise altogether. The result is a movie that does basically honor the continuity introduced by Suicide Squad but has a completely different tone and creative team.



After the film was released the studio, in a desperate grab to salvage the film’s prospect, changed its title to “Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey” (the original title is still there in the actual movie so I’ll be sticking with it here). That is a bad title too but in a way it’s more accurate: this is basically a Harley Quinn solo movie, the Birds of Prey are barely in it and when they are in it they kind of suck. The Renee Montoya character is alright but the other two are thinly drawn and just kind of seem lame as action heroines in the first place. This is at its best when it’s functioning as a Harley Quinn solo movie pure and simple but even as that it’s a little bit of a mixed bag. Despite being a Suicide Squad sequel what this movie desperately wants to be is Deadpool. It has a similar sort of R-rated profane irreverence and operates with a voice-over which bends, but doesn’t entirely break, the fourth wall. There’s a bit of a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” mentality to the whole thing. Some of the film’s jokes are legitimately clever, some of them are just kind of obnoxious, and the movie is also never really sure who much of an anti-heroine it wants Harley Quinn to be. This also extends to the action scenes, some of which are quite well choreographed and executed and some of which are just kind of messy, like the finale where the heroes are fighting through a bunch of mysteriously unarmed henchmen. The whole movie is just messy and not really to my taste, but it’s hardly the disaster that the studio seemed to think it was and there’s some good stuff in there.

**1/2 out of Five

I liked it. I thought it had some really cool fights