Birds Of Prey And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

Don't believe the hype. Whilst Margot Robbie returns on form and Ewan McGregor tries his best, this movie barely goes anywhere for a hour in terms of plot, which basically kills the film before it gets going. Nothing more than exhaustingly repetitive fight scenes, largely unimaginative violence (the only stand out scene being the police station), gratuitous swearing and (apart from Robbie and McGregor) tiresome acting and pointless backstory. Suicide Squad was a mess, this is no better.

Bland, boring and unenjoyable. I'm surprised that it's not unbearably woke, but that doesn't mean it's good. The acting is poor (the only one who cared was Jurnee Smollett-Bell), the story was not engaging, and has debatably the worse marketing ever. They didn't want men to watch it, they blamed men for it being a flop, and they have the balls to say women like it, when I know a lot of women who don't like it, or don't want to support them. Don't bother wasting your money.

One of the few enjoyable films in the "DCEU". Birds of Prey is grungy, bloody fun which at times reminded me of William Friedkin’s ‘Sorcerer’ (1977), in that it deftly juggles a group of separate characters, setting-up and fleshing-out each one’s disparate stakes in the proceedings, before bringing them all together at the end for the showdown. The staging and the choreography of both the action and the script is really good, when you’d otherwise think that with so many elements in the mix, it ought to have been a complete mess. But then, the screenplay is written by Christina Hodson who also scripted Bumblebee (2018), which much like 'BOP', is a really great instalment in a notoriously messy franchise.