![]() McGregor’s antagonist - who runs the town and has a penchant for both African art and peeling the face off rivals - nibbles rather than chews scenery he isn’t big and flamboyant enough to pose a genuine threat. There are flashbacks within flashbacks and comedy title-cards (“4 Minutes Ago”) but the time-shifting dissipates momentum in the middle stretch - you never get the sense that Yan, whose only previous feature is absurdist satire Dead Pigs, has a firm grip on the narrative. It’s so much fun when the group finally come together, it feels like a misstep not getting them together sooner. The film sets up the question of who is Harley without Mr J? The answer lies with a motley crew of diverse women. Quickly recapping the events of Suicide Squad in animated form, we quickly learn Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Joker have broken up - she publically updates her relationship status by driving a truck into Ace Chemicals, the plant where she pledged herself to the clown prince of crime - and the film frenetically establishes her trying to cope on her own buying a hyena she calls Bruce (after Wayne), roller derbying, her partying antics captured in one long shot like a coked-up 1917. It’s a moving-on-after-a-break-up movie, a Marriage Story with punch-ups. Perhaps the first rug-pull is that it isn’t strictly a Birds Of Prey flick at all. ![]() It doesn’t all work, but it’s a gaudy, muddled, mostly entertaining glitter-grenade celebration of just how women can fuck shit up. Because Birds Of Prey not only shares the DNA of a girl gang who can kick your sorry ass - Cathy Yan’s film also boasts some of the subversive and rockabilly spirit of QT’s ’94 classic. It’s a particularly apt part-time alias for Robbie’s passion project, the first big-screen outing for DC’s all-women superhero squad. For the uninitiated, ‘Fox Force Five’ is Mia Wallace’s ( Uma Thurman) never-aired TV pilot in Pulp Fiction concerning five female secret agents each with a distinct identity and skill - a knife thrower, a kung fu master, a demolition expert and a French girl whose “speciality was sex”. At the behest of star and producer Margot Robbie, the working title for (deep breath) Birds Of Prey (And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn) was ‘Fox Force Five’.
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