Birds of Prey

Or: “Hair Tie?”

Finally. A super heroine movie we deserve (and it’s even the one that we need right now). In a city rife with a misogynistic abusers ranging from office sexism to deluded crime-lords who collect faces (figuratively and literally), circumstance throws together a motley crew of talented women out to take names and break legs (lots and lots of legs) lead by the henchman turned anti-heroine (and cinema doll turned puckish grandmaster) Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie).

“Emancipated” from the toxic influence of “Mistah J,” Harley has set herself on becoming her own force in Gotham’s underworld. Unfortunately her very public breakup sends all manner of parties grieved by Harley’s past exploits to seek their revenge. Flushed into the employ of aforementioned face carving crime boss Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor) to hunt down a young pick pocket Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), a fugitive who has also caught the interest of Dina Lance (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) powerfully gifted singer in Roman’s employ, a tough-hearted GYPD detective Rene Montoya (Rosie Perez), and a mysterious cross-bow wielding assassin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).

It’s a thrilling movie, told with Robbie’s distinctive style of fourth wall surmounting camaraderie. Screenwriter Christina Hodson staples us to Harley’s nonlinear thought process, doubling back across the timeline for a maximum return of surprise and a minim of confusion. Director Cathy Yan also has an expert sense of a storyteller, keeping her lines (in car chases, fights, and scenes of danger) clear and thorough. Her fight-sequences in particular are crips fine things, bloody but unjarred, and with a greater sweep than one female-written blade-flick song can contain (the music blasting cheerfully as evil doers and smashed, stabbed, shot, hammered, and blasted with confetti). Even the costumes, (designed by Erin Benach) are works of both beauty and clarity, attractive without being revealing, and suitably armored for the discerning woman out to conduct vigilante justice. It’s a film who’s every aspect feels grounded, no matter the dark glitz or comic-book impossibility of it, where a city of super-villains can go roller-derbying and the common folk, in the course of living their own lives, just duck and get out of the way.

Hodson allows Harley to shine, not just the cracks in her psyche but her breadth of psychiatric knowledge and deftness at proffering advice, and Yan sets Robbie up for her signature talent; a multi-layered expressions, her own face a master’s canvas for capturing the very essence of villainous glee to bitter confusion over lies complexities to awe of and terror for the best breakfast sandwich in the city. The other eponymous birds, while awarded less screen time, are also fully developed. Smollett-Bell mixes wariness and wryness for Dinah, with a particular grace in foot-to-face combat. Perez, who’s character “talks like she’s out of an eighties cop movie,” is also a tenacious brawler and savage wit. And Winstead delivers a splendid (nearly show-stealing) mix of awe-fluttering and adorable, penetrating the throats of mobsters one moment and anxiously rehearsing her bad*ss speeches in the bathroom mirror in the next.

For the truly truly villainous Roman, McGregor is having a lovely time, bouncing off the walls with his equally excitable (and very non-platonically involved) henchman Victor Zsarz ( the understatedly menacing Chris Messina). Bisexual they may be but the casual misogamy (with a healthy side dose or racism to taste) reeks from their actions, entertaining but completely unsympathetic or enticing, without being flat; McGregor’s funhouse spins of delight and depravity becoming refreshingly repulsive. Their particularly gory ends are well deserved, and Quinn’s aside that Roman hates her simply for “having a vagina” rings depressingly true. There are more than enough villains in our world who’d do as wicked a deed to a woman, any woman, for the exact same reason.

But the glory of the film Beyond its comedy and its sleek storytelling, is the arch glance it casts at its audience that the time of the testosterone-scented shoot-ups should step aside for a more evolved style of film. Captured by Roman and his goons, Harley exasperatedly dispenses with Roman’s “Let me threaten you with painful death while I speak at length about my masterplan” moment (leavened with cutting psychological diagnoses). It deconstructs the genre without dancing a jig on its subjects grave and never once sacrificing its pace or earnestness. In the middle of one fight Harley, on roller-skates (of course) shoots past an embattled Dinah, helpfully offering, “Hair tie?” It’s a brief moment but it sinks a silver pin into the film, a mark that was written and directed and acted by women who are in control of their art and confident in the story they were telling. It’s a superhero film that allows women, not only to snap the knees of foul and petulant men but be human with each other. And that is a real work of wonder.