Genre: Comic Book
Premise: Harley Quinn tries to figure life out after the Joker dumps her and gets caught up in a diamond theft that ignites Gotham’s newest baddie, Black Mask, to try and kill her.
About: Harley Quinn was projected to make 45-55 million dollars this weekend. That was down from the projections Warner Brothers had when making the movie, which were closer to the 75-85 million dollar range. Sadly, the film finished with a measly 33 million bucks and is considered a full-blown box office disaster.
Writers: Christina Hodson
Details: 110 minutes
Harley Quinn.
I’m not here to dance on this movie’s grave. A lot of people worked on this film and, unlike a lot of movies that come out of this town, these people really cared. It’s said that there was a woman heading up every major department in the film. And all of them felt they had something to prove.
Nobody was more determined to make Harley Quinn work than its star and producer, Margot Robbie. I saw an interview where Margot was asked what her favorite Harley Quinn tattoo was and she didn’t skip a beat, going into an extensive explanation about Harley’s first tattoo and how she got it and what it meant to her. All I could think was, “Wow, Margot really cares about this character.”
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way of this film’s development, they decided to embrace an anti-male slant. In retrospect, I guess this makes sense. The movie was being written and prepped during that rabid six month stretch where everyone thought Twitter was real life and if you were Caucasian and had an xy chromosome, you were the devil incarnate.
The first white man to enter this story is a drooling bald-headed creepy pet salesman who says he accepts sex for payment. Harley feeds him to her hyena. The next white man is an a-hole who calls Harley a slut. Harley breaks his legs. The next four white men introduced are gunned down while eating dinner by the Huntress. They don’t even have time to protest their death. The next two white men introduced try to rape Harley after a long night out.
Put simply, if you are white and a man in the Harley Quinn universe, it ain’t going to end well.
Finally, about 15 minutes into the film, we see that Harley has one Caucasian male friend – the cook who makes her daily greasy egg sandwich. The two are smiling and jovial. I thought, okay, I’m glad they’re at least portraying one white guy as cool. And then as Harley’s leaving, her voice over reveals that the man is Armenian.
Look, anybody can make any movie they want. If you want to portray an entire demographic in a negative light, you are well within your rights to do so. It’s art. It has no rules. However, you have to then be accepting when the demographic you’re destroying has no interest in seeing your movie. I mean who wants to spend two hours being told that people who like you are bad?
I guess I’m surprised because it’s such an odd business choice. You’re hating on the demographic that spends the most time in movie theaters. It’s weird. Why didn’t somebody come in and say something? “Maybe we should be inclusive and positive about all races and genders?” In the immortal words of Dana Carvey as George Bush: “Neht gunna dew it.”
Eventually, a movie emerged out of this. Sorta. The plot follows Harley Quinn as she’s coming out of a bad breakup with the Joker. The film shamelessly attempts to be this year’s Deadpool, with Harley Quinn bee-bopping her way through an endless “listen to how clever I am” voice over narration, all of which could’ve been distilled down to a single sentence (“The Joker and I broke up.”).
The plot then decides to take a bathroom break, forcing the audience and the characters to wait around for him. In the meantime we learn something about mobsters in Gotham and that someone’s going around shooting people. None of it ties into anything that you would call “relevant” but we do meet club owner Black Mask, played by the only person who comes out of this movie unscathed, Ewan McGregor. He has a few funny lines.
Finally, after a good twenty minutes, the plot waltzes back in the room with a theatrical, “fiiiiiiiiiine!” and gives us some direction. A young Korean pickpocket girl inadvertently lifts a million dollar diamond off of Black Mask’s second-in-command and Black Mask, who has captured and is about to kill Harley Quinn, for some reason hires her to go after the girl and get the diamond back.
Harley finally finds the girl, who by this point has swallowed the diamond. This means Harley can’t turn her in until the diamond passes through her system. So Harley takes her back to her hideout where, within the span of five minutes, she becomes best friends with the girl, and now she’s not so sure she wants to give the diamond or the girl up to Black Mask. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter because Black Mask is coming to get them.
I wish I had anything good to say about this movie.
But I don’t.
Most of the badness here is baked into the script itself.
The narrative is uber-weak. It’s Harley Quinn whining for half an hour about I don’t even know what. Then, out of nowhere, a random girl steals a diamond, a diamond we only learned about two minutes prior, and then everybody is after the diamond and that’s the plot. I bring up the fact that we only learned about the diamond two minutes prior because it shows how low the stakes are in this movie. The thing everyone is after had zero significance in the audiences’ eyes. The only reason it exists is to engineer some semblance of a plot.
Then there are all these little things that conveyed how amateurish the writing was. At one point, in the middle of the first act, Harley’s getting beat up, and, while talking to us in voice over, says, “In the storytelling world, this device is known as a complication.”
Um, no it isn’t.
A complication requires that your character have an objective to complicate. At this point in the story, there is no goal. Nobody is after anything. It was just Harley Quinn rambling in voice over while we meet a bunch of people we’d later learn had nothing to do with the story. So if you’re going to try and be clever and fourth-wall breaking and bring up screenwriting vocabulary, you might want to actually learn what the device is you’re talking about.
But there’s a much bigger problem at the heart of this movie and it’s something I’ve been asking ever since it was announced that Harley Quinn would get her own movie. What is it that Harley Quinn DOES? What makes her special? In other words, why does she deserve her own movie? I spent two hours with this character this weekend and I still can’t answer that question. As far I can tell, she’s just some loudmouthed eccentric person who likes to play dress up. What is it about that that makes someone think she deserves her own movie? I don’t get it.
And then there was the directing, which vacillated between generic and extra generic. The action scenes felt like the director was learning on the job. Many sequences came across as if the crew ran out of time and had to stick in a bunch of those garden-variety stunt moves you can see in a thousand 1985 B-action movies. There were occasional flashes of inspiration, like a couple of shots where Harley beats someone up with a bat. But they’d be surrounded by tons of locked down wide-angle shots that any second year film school student at USC could’ve pulled off. Where is the vision here? Where is the specialness that separates the good directors from the wannabes – that makes you say, “Oh, I understand why this director got the job over everyone else.” Cause those qualities were not evident in the finished product.
This was a misfire on every level.
And the problems started at the conception stage. Nobody ever asked the question, “What makes this character special?” You then coupled that with an aggressive campaign to exclude a group of people. So should you really be surprised that no one showed up to your movie? Maybe there are a few lessons to learn from this if the people involved are willing to have honest conversations with themselves.
If you’re looking to watch a good female-driven movie this week, go to Netflix instead and watch Horse Girl. It’s weird and trippy and unique and it doesn’t try to paint any one demographic as bad.
Finally, props to the two screenwriting Oscar winners this year. The Academy got it right! JoJo Rabbit and Parasite were my top two favorite screenplays of the year!
[x] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure your title and your movie line up. I know this seems obvious. But it’s a mistake I encounter fairly often. And it happened with today’s film. This movie is titled “Birds of Prey,” but it’s not about this “group” known as the Birds of Prey at all. They’re barely in the movie. This movie is 98% Harley Quinn doing Harley Quinn stuff. Have the title reflect that.
