![]() ![]() Robbie first came across the all-female superhero team Birds of Prey while researching Harley Quinn for her role in the 2016 film Suicide Squad. He and Yan even get to have fun with a musical sequence set to Megan Thee Stallion's Diamonds, in which a concussed Harley slips into a reverie to imagine herself as Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). ( Supplied: Claudette Barius/Warner Bros)ĭirecting only her second feature, after the Jia Zhangke-produced Dead Pigs (2018), Chinese-American filmmaker Cathy Yan lends a sense of fringes-of-the-city community to Christina Hodson's (Bumblebee) sisterhood-themed script, while keeping the action and performances humming along at an agreeable clip.īirds of Prey is also strikingly shot, with Matthew Libatique's (Black Swan, A Star is Born) smoky, colourful cinematography - especially vivid during a sequence in which Harley marches into a police station and picks off officers with her confetti cannon - giving the film an eye-popping, kaleidoscopic texture (not to mention a generous serve of good old-fashioned bisexual lighting). Montoya, who, like Harley, first appeared in TV's much-loved Batman: The Animated Series (1992), is trying to crack a case involving a missing mob diamond, while having her chops busted by her DA ex-girlfriend (Ali Wong), and her precinct captain, played by Steven Williams - the 21 Jump Street veteran playing off an amusing running gag about Montoya's obsession with 80s cop clichés.Ĭhinese-American director Yan is the first Asian woman to helm a superhero film. "She just publicly updated her relationship status," observes veteran Gotham police detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), and pretty soon every goon in Gotham with a grievance - which turns out to be almost everyone - wants a piece of Harley. (She also takes in a pet hyena - as one does - that she affectionately names Bruce, after the alter ego of her Caped Crusader adversary.) Loading ( Supplied: Warner Bros)Īfter blowing her and the Joker's beloved ACE chemical plant sky-high, Harley settles into the classic newly single routine of binge-drinking, roller-derbying and sucking Cheese Whiz direct from the can, feeling alternately empowered and sorry for herself to the stomp of - of course - Joan Jett's I Hate Myself For Loving You. The film's aesthetic for Gotham City draws from Joel Schumacher's colourful and camp 90s Batman films as well as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy. ![]()
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