![]() ![]() Now Harley Quinn is back, in Birds of Prey, which begins after she and Joker’s break up, and leaves forever ambiguous the question of which Joker this Harley Quinn had been dating. Then there was a separate Joker origin story movie, Joker, which cast Joaquin Phoenix in the title role, acted like Suicide Squad and this movie didn’t exist, and became the most profitable comic book movie ever. ![]() Harley Quinn shows up as the bubbly girlfriend of Jared Leto’s Juggalo drug lord Joker, a character that himself was barely in the movie (probably for the best). Her live-action run began in 2016’s Suicide Squad, a movie that was disassembled and re-edited by the company who made the first trailer and since cryptically maybe-disavowed by its own director. The artistic challenge of our times is trying to synthesize all the commercially symbiotic iterations of your title character into a coherent whole, and rarely has this been as difficult as with Harley Quinn. And yet it retains throughout a certain spunky charm.īirds of Prey (directed by Cathy Yan and written by Christina Hodson) is a little like a cinematic “Louie Louie” - composed of at least 50% sour notes but the people making it are so clearly having fun that it consistently makes you smile (also in this analogy “Louie Louie” cost about $100 million to make and The Kingsmen are a multi-national corporation). One of its big action set pieces is set to a slowed-down dramatic cover of “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” and it’s one of those prequels that ends right where you expected it to begin, a la the closing shot of King Arthur that showed them building the round table in the background. ![]() Birds of Prey is a tonal disaster and a narrative hackjob. ![]()
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