Birds of Prey: (And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

The awaited girl gang movie arrived on February 7th. The anticipation of this film after the announcement was very high and I went to see it on opening weekend. I have to say this movie is another good direction for DCU. The last few movies DC has out has been doing well. I’m not looking at the numbers of anything but the quality of the films is what I care about. I mean its 2 hours were not going to get back its minds well be a good watch rather than something the companies just threw together.

Spoilers Ahead!

As a DC fangirl, I enjoyed this movie because one of my favorite female superheroes made her DCU debut, Black Canary. I wanted to see how they would let her play out in this film and it was great I think this version of Black Canary is a winner. Jurnee Smollett knocked it out of the park and I’m not mad at the race switch that was done.

Personally I wouldn’t really be mad at any of the future race swaps for superheroes because they are fictional characters. As long as the backstories we took the time out to learn doesn’t all of a sudden change because they wanted to change the race of a character. One reason I’m not upset with Black Canary is that her backstory doesn’t have any cultural significance to her race so Black Canary could be reimagined.

I’m not just saying that as a Black Woman either. Jurnee was a perfect fit for Black Canary and I hope DCU uses her in other films to have more character development in this universe. I’m excited to see if they would bring in a Green Arrow to spark the romantic relationship between them. They are one of my favorite DC couples.

A backstory that was a good run through was Huntress, it was right to the point and we understood her angle in the film. Huntress going after Sionis wasn’t even about him it was about his right-hand man for obvious reasons at first then it was turned towards Sionis after meeting with Rosie Perez’s character Renee Montoya.

Moving onto to Renee I’m not sure why any citizen in Gotham would ever want to become a cop but the whole police task force in Gotham City is absolute madness. It looks like Renee is the only one that cares about doing her job. Her former partner who is now the captain of GCPD stole her credit from a big case they worked on years back and Renee has to see that every day she goes into work. The running joke in this film about Renee is she talks like an 80s cop show and its mentioned so often that you start to hear it when she spoke.

This film mainly revolved around Cassandra Cain the infamous pickpocketer. She steals the diamond from Sionis right-hand man Victor and this starts her adventure with Harley. It started out as just getting Cassandra as the bounty and give her up to Sionis next thing it turned into an adventure of gathering girls to create the crew that has something against the bad guy Sionis.

Now onto the main character of the film Harley Quinn, I love the direction she has been going in the last couple of years. Branching away from Joker and becoming her own character of her choice. For me, Harley is becoming more of an Anti-Hero because she still does bad but she also does good. Margot’s Harley was horrible in suicide squad, in fact, I wasted time I’ll never get back for even watching that movie all the way through. I really love the playful and expressive Harley we’ve gotten to know in this film.

I do think the more screentime could have been given to the gang as a whole but it’s Harley’s movie so I understand. I found each character pretty interesting even though I felt like their backstories were pretty rushed into. Honestly, if it was going to be like that we didn’t really need it to be rushed through like it was. The narration from Harley was probably most annoying to me because it was going on throughout the beginning of the film and suddenly died off before the halfway mark. Personally, narration should be left for documentaries, The film could have just happened in real-time without the flashback narration since all the events happened around the same time.

I enjoyed the film entirely and it has some interesting ideas as they played with how female characters are viewed in movies. As we can see female directors are the way to go. There’s been nothing but positive reactions after a character gets a redemption movie like Harley. I didn’t think her solo film was necessary after the suicide squad movie since that seemed like the Harley they were going for. She’s a popular character at the moment so a movie for her makes sense. The animated series on DC Universe streaming service has the same energy for Harley and it’s working out in their favor if they keep her going in this direction.

Birds of Prey: (And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) Out in theaters now!