Birds of Prey…

Up front, I think Margot Robbie is superb actress and has done some remarkable work and her Harley Quinn was the only bright spark in the rather dull Suicide Squad, so I went into Birds of Prey looking forward to it, sadly I was very disappointed.

The cast are fine, Robbie is as always hugely enjoyable and well supported by Perez, Winstead and Smollet-Bell, Ewan McGregor is entertaining as the villain, but and it’s a seemingly continual problem for many of DC’s attempts with their comic book stories, it’s dull, it doesn’t really know what it wants, caught between trying to have the fun violence of Deadpool and the exploration of the psyche offered by Joker, but gets nowhere near either.

Scorsese talked recently about how superhero films are not real cinema, now while this is nonsense what Birds of Prey shows is that there is truly a skill to doing this well, Marvel continually get it right, DC far too often don’t.

They have tried to be original with this, trying to make it more interesting, but it just seems to miss the mark, never funny enough to pull off the Deadpool idea and never going to explore Joker in the way Phoenix does and that’s the big problem, the tone of the film bounces all over the place and is a bit of a mess with a pace that is much too pedestrian to keep you fully engaged.

It’s a real pity that it doesn’t work, their was an idea in there to explore and Margot Robbie could pull off pretty much anything, but this unfortunately didn’t offer a clear enough target to hit and missed it almost completely.