The good-natured,
yet hyper-violent Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley
Quinn is amusing enough to get by, a sort-of Deadpool-lite strung
together with a wink, a pagan’s prayer and a lot of chicken wire, and absent
the Ryan Reynolds picture’s impudent, gruesome, genuinely transgressive and
hugely entertaining impulses. But BOP is a distinct upgrade over the
Oscar-winning-epic-that-shall-not-be-named from whose befouled loins it sprang came
(okay, okay, Suicide Squad, but you likely knew that already), and it
allows Ewan McGregor, as the unctuous and evil villain Black Mask, the most fun
he’s probably ever had on screen. Margot Robbie, of course, chews it up in
grand style too as our bubblegum-snapping “heroine,” the admittedly insane but magnetically
likable Harley Quinn, the Joker’s ex-girlfriend, whose mismatched wardrobe
reflects the bells and whistles constantly jangling about inside her head but
is also a continuing act of found fashion art, like what might happen if
Jackson Pollock did a line for Hot Topic. Robbie has her share of kicks as
well, of course, even if the movie isn’t sharp or funny enough to match her
enthusiasm. There are also game turns from Rosie Perez as an
‘80s-cop-show-obsessed cop (an idea the movie does almost nothing with), Jurnee
Smollett-Bell as a songstress/not-at-all-committed employee of the Mask’s whose
glass-shattering voice might have Ella Fitzgerald protesting from the grave,
Chris Messina as the Mask’s creepy, face-stealing henchman, and Ella Jay Basco
as the pickpocketing kid around whom all this nonsense spins.
But the
movie is near-stolen by Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Huntress, a mysterious,
revenge-inspired assassin with a pretty by-the-numbers back story who dishes
out gory karma all while constantly correcting onlookers about her assumed
moniker and choice of weaponry. The young actress absolutely sells her
pseudo-hero’s poker-faced, confident purpose while at the same time undermining
it with the humorous insecurity of a kid brought up in isolation on a steady
diet of unslaked vengeance who just, in her own weird way, wants to reconnect
with the concept of belonging to a sort of family. Winstead is deadpan
hilarious here, and she and Robbie share the movie’s best sequence, a
motorcycle-car chase that finally moves the picture’s roller derby sensibility
from subtext to rip-roaring text, with Harley Quinn on skates behind Huntress’s
cycle, whipping around, over and onto a fleeing car full of creeps. Birds of
Prey is worth seeing for this sequence alone, but Robbie, McGregor, and
especially Winstead make it worth the whole trip.
Which leads
me to my nifty Mary Elizabeth Winstead story. When my eldest daughter was five,
we saw the superhero comedy Sky High at a drive-in. We not only loved
the movie, a sort-of wackier John Hughes-type coming-of-age picture done up at a high school
for budding superheroes who don’t quite know what to do with how their bodies
are changing, adapting to their nascent super-abilities, but we also loved
Winstead in it—she plays the superhero high school’s most popular student, who
has designs on the story’s protagonist and who goes from potential girlfriend
to deadly foe, in a Disney way, of course. About a year after we saw the movie,
and after we’d bought it and seen in a couple thousand more times on DVD, my daughters
and wife and I were window shopping in Burbank and strolled into an Urban
Outfitters where I almost immediately spotted the actress, who was standing and
talking to a friend. (At almost six feet, she was very striking and kinda hard
to miss.) So after a moment or two to screw up my courage, I walked over,
introduced myself, explained that my six and four-year-old daughters were huge
fans of her performance as the super-villainess Royal Pain, and asked if she’d
mind if I brought them over to meet her. This was early enough in her career
that Winstead may have been purely happy just to have been recognized, but she
seemed delighted by the suggestion, and so I retrieved my kids and we stepped
over to where she was.
The
looks on their faces, especially my eldest’s, as they met their first, and
maybe favorite at the time, movie star was, as they say, priceless. Winstead
talked to them for a few minutes, was extremely charming, and also still enough
of a kid herself at the time to be real with them in a way that she might not
otherwise have been able to access, and I will always love her for that moment
she gave my kids. So, when I sat next to my daughter last night as she crushed
massively over Winstead on-screen as Huntress, it was a really neat and once-in-a-lifetime
thing to be able to remember that moment and remind my kid about it afterward.
She would have loved the movie anyway, but this terrific young actress sealed
that response with a well-placed arrow right in my daughter’s heart.
Thanks,
#MaryElizabethWinstead,
wherever you are!
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