Birds of Prey

Yeah, I'm not typing out that entire title.

First things first, to get it out of the way: Ella Jay Basco does fine as this movie's version of Cassandra Cain. Which is to say, at playing a sassy teen, marginally competent* pickpocket that drives the plot.  Granted, her character bears no resemblance to anything I'd associate with the name "Cassandra Cain", and unless Kelly Puckett and Daimon Scott got some nice royalty checks for this, I'd just as soon they'd named the character something else, but that's not on Basco or her performance. She did what the movie asked her to do.

Margot Robbie's a good Harley Quinn. She seems to be having fun, certainly, which feels essential for a movie with a kind of absurd comic tone like this one. Ewan McGregor is doing. . . something. It was like a combination of Kevin Bacon in X-Men First Class and Jason Schwatzman as Gideon Graves in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. This sort of cheesy over-the-top thing where the guy is trying so hard to be "quirky" you can't tell if it's supposed to be part of the character, or it's just the actor. You definitely need the villain to be more evil than Harley (and given the crap she openly admits to doing when she was with the Joker, that's a long order), but I'm not sure you want someone out-crazying her.

Also, was I supposed to read Roman Sionis and Zsasz as lovers? Or maybe it's an unrequited thing where Zsasz is hung up on his boss, so he likes killing women to keep them away from what's "his", but I don't know.

Of the Birds, I like Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress the best. She's very angry, but also extremely awkward with people in a way where you can tell she spent a lot of time around assassins and focused on killing. The whole, 'You got rage issues. I don't have rage issues!' part made me laugh. Jurnee Smollett kind of gets the short end of the stick, because she's the world-weary, sensible one. Has to play the calm exasperated center with all these complete lunatics running around her. 

You'd think that would be Rosie Perez' role as Renee Montoya, as a burnt-out cop, but she's too much of a loose cannon. She still believes in the work if not the institution of the police. Little disappointed we never saw her punch her captain. But we did get Harley shooting a bunch of cops in the face with beanbag rounds. That was good.

I didn't really like the back-and-forth nature of how the story was presented. Where the plot would advance, then screech to a halt so Harley could detail someone else's backstory. I liked it fine in the first Deadpool movie as an approach, but that movie picked better points to stop. Or maybe I just felt like the exposition was unnecessary. 

Like the one where Harley explains why she's attacking a police station looking for Cassandra. I knew why. Roman's guys caught her, and she's retrieving Cass and the diamond to get herself out of trouble. I didn't need what felt like an interminable flashback of her and Sionis interacting to connect those dots. It felt like the story had momentum, shit was happening, she was going to meet the kid and have to make a choice and then. . . it just crashes to a halt.

There were some structural issues, but it was funny in places, and I mostly didn't get impatient for it to hurry up, so count it as a win.

* She was getting caught by Gotham cops, who are presented as so stupid and incompetent I can't believe they manage to zip up their flies without getting their balls caught.