Along with Sonic the Hedgehog and Robert Downey, Jr.’s Dolittle, Birds of Prey was one of the last major Hollywood releases before movie theaters were indefinitely closed to accommodate the spread of coronavirus. While the virus is obviously a big factor in the movie’s failure to break even at the box office, Sonic managed to pull in blockbuster numbers in the same release window. Audiences were skeptical about Birds of Prey because it was a direct sequel to Suicide Squad and they’d been let down by the DCEU a bunch of times before.
Ultimately, Birds of Prey’s biggest problem is that it can’t decide what it wants to be. Throughout its 109-minute runtime, it’s torn between being two different movies. It’s set up as an ensemble team-up movie but styled as a Deadpool-esque fourth-wall-breaking Harley Quinn solo movie. The ensemble element is at odds with Harley omnisciently controlling the movie like the Merc with a Mouth. Warner Bros. basically admitted they couldn’t decide what this movie was supposed to be when they changed the title to Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey in the middle of its release. The intention, apparently, was to boost box office numbers, but it only served to confirm what skeptical viewers already suspected: Warner botched another DC movie.
Director Cathy Yan has revealed that Warner Bros. meddled in her vision for Birds of Prey, and the revelation surprised no one. Yan didn’t mention anything specific, but studio interference is obvious in the final product and it fits an unfortunate pattern with this particular studio. Patty Jenkins had to fight Warner Bros. for all the best parts of Wonder Woman. In the middle of making Justice League, Zack Snyder suddenly had a two-hour runtime limit enforced on an ambitious epic that’s now being released in its original form clocking in at four hours. David Ayer directed Suicide Squad on an absurdly accelerated schedule as a dark, brooding drama, then Warner Bros. hired the editors of the well-received comedic trailer to recut the entire movie as a feature-length trailer, which unsurprisingly resulted in a disaster.
After Harley’s scenes in Suicide Squad were overtly framed with the male gaze in mind, Margot Robbie joined Birds of Prey as a producer to have more creative control. But ultimately, the studio is plunking down $100 million, so they’re the ones who get the final say. And it’s a shame, because a lot of recent failures, like Solo: A Star Wars Story and The Predator, would’ve benefited from studio executives stepping back and letting the director (or directors, in the case of Solo’s original helmers, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller) do their job.
Christina Hodson’s screenplay was the focal point of a lot of Birds of Prey’s more negative reviews, because the writing exemplifies the aimlessness and indecisiveness of the movie as a whole. Hodson’s script often uses nonlinear storytelling for the sake of being nonlinear and not because presenting the scenes out of order actually enhances the story. For example, in one scene, Harley infiltrates a police station with no context, so the audience has no engagement with the action, then her voiceover explains the context of what she’s doing over an exposition-filled montage, then the police station shootout continues. The structure has no purpose. The movie just plods from plot point to plot point in the most obvious ways possible. When nonlinear storytelling is used this way, it just comes off as lazy screenwriting.
It’s unclear if Birds of Prey’s script problems are a result of Warner Bros. pushing for specific rewrites, but either way, the plot is completely muddled. Its narrator wants it to be a carefree hangout movie with no stakes or danger where the main priority is eating a breakfast sandwich, but it’s also beholden to the action-driven three-act structure of the average comic book blockbuster, and the result is kind of a mess. Most of the movie is spent waiting for Cassandra Cain to poop out the MacGuffin.
Whereas Deadpool used its R rating to accurately portray ‘Pool as he’s characterized in the comics, Birds of Prey’s R rating is just used for gratuitous violence. This movie wouldn’t have suffered from not showing Black Mask cutting off a guy’s face or not showing Black Mask getting torn limb from limb by an exploding grenade. Birds of Prey uses its R rating in the same way that the 2019 Hellboy reboot did, exhibiting excessive gore just because it could.
With stunning visuals, energetic direction, and a bunch of great performances, Birds of Prey is far from a bad movie. It holds together much better than Suicide Squad or the theatrical cut of Justice League. But it held itself back by going for two opposing styles at once. But if it had committed to being either an ensemble team-up movie or a Harley Quinn solo adventure, it could’ve been so much better. Maybe, one glorious day, Warner Bros. will learn to give filmmakers a little creative freedom.
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