![]() To balance the earlier grisly killing of the family, but nope, the sadism of that earlier killing is in the story as decoration. With that sort of element in the story, you'd think by the end there'd be an eye-for-an-eye retribution on Chris Messina as knife-wielding henchman Victor Zsasz provides us with the visual of a family being murdered by having their faces removed via his blade (one of the family is apparently a child or teenager). Well, who knows.Ī certain amount of unwelcome sadism infiltrated this movie. If the script had been a symmetrical division between the two characters of Harley and Black Mask maybe it would have helped improve things. ![]() It's as if Birds of Prey was supposed to be a team movie (hence the title) but it veered sideways into a solo spotlight. He's not given enough room to achieve this, though. She dominates the presentation of Birds of Prey like no one else, though Ewan McGregor tries to balance the film with a psychotic Black Mask as the nefarious villain. Robbie aggressively attacks the screen, as if she's trying to pull along the whole movie by herself, a berserk salesman determined to close the deal with the audience. Where Suicide Squad presented her as a person trying to deal with a struggle for self-responsibility (and thus independence) in Birds of Prey she is a garbage-littering juvenile who has flashes of epiphany about herself, but then it gets buried under the tread-mill plot and a tone of nihilism. In Birds of Prey, there's too much humanity missing, and in the main character particularly. It isn't the ticket-buyer's job to decode the story progression. Instead, here in Birds of Prey is a circular time-swapping storytelling that might have been an initially clever attempt to express the ADHD personality of Harley Quinn by her explaining things to the audience (she narrates parts of the tale), but instead the end result is fragmentation of the storytelling with a narrator butting in trying to straighten out what the movie-watcher shouldn't have to be wrestling with if the director was telling the story coherently. ![]() The hyperkinetic style of Birds of Prey and its script doesn't compensate for all of this like Ayer's script did for the earlier film. ![]() In Birds of Prey the situation is reversed and the contrast is gone. Harley (or that is, Margot Robbie) stood out in Suicide Squad, one reason being her contrast to the mostly male team she was partnered with. Supposedly Ayer's cut was darker and less "funny"). The irony is that Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn was the heart of Suicide Squad (along with Will Smith as Deadshot), and despite the fouled-up story construction in that film, the characters (courtesy of a good cast) triumphed over the impediment of everything else (which may be from DC/Warner's meddling with that movie after director David Ayer made his cut. Other than a prologue about her romantic break-up with the Joker, there is little progression by the end of the tale. Even Margot Robbie's Harley is at best only a continuation of the Harley from Suicide Squad. Birds of Prey borrows from recent action films but adds little that is new to the genre. The 2016 film was plagued by a lot of the same problems this 2020 offering has: jumpy editing, a sound track crammed with too many pop-tunes, and the flat unreality that superhero movies absentmindedly fall into when the fists and the kicks start flying. Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (original title)Īs a continuation of Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey fails to give the audience what the earlier film did.
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