Hey Everyone,

Paul here..

The new trailer for Birds of Prey (Or The Who Gives A Fuck Bullshit of Fucking Harley Quinn) has dropped. Do with that information what you will. My only interest in this movie is a vague curiosity about how characters I’ve been reading on the comic book pages for years, will be translated into into a live action big budget comic book movie. Check out the trailer here and then read my thoughts on the project below:
https://youtu.be/x3HbbzHK5Mc

Is it just me or does it seem like Warner Bros. really doesn’t give a shit about this movie? It should be a bigger event for DC/Warner Bros., studios have seemed to realize niche genre movies released I’m mid-February have a tendency to do well. Movies like Kingsman: The Secret Service and Deadpool we’re both big successes, coming out on, or near, Valentines Day weekend. So at the very least, this seems like a good spot to release a movie like this. But it feels like two steps forward one step back with DC. After a string of hits with Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Shazam!, and Joker, as well as the. highly anticipated Wonder Woman 1984 coming out this summer, Birds of Prey seems like a step backwards into the realm of Suicide Squad and Justice League.

On one hand, this look like it could be a real dumpster fire, but there’s a part of me that thinks there’s a small chance it could be cool. After watching the trailer a few times, I’ll say this for the trailer, it definitely has a fun energy to it. I also noticed some interesting elements and choices made by the filmmakers. For example, there are big visual cues and callbacks to several excellent Harley Quinn focused episodes of Batman The Animated Series like “Harley’s Holiday”, “Harlequinade”, and “Harley and Ivy”. If there’s any source material Birds of Prey would be wise to draw inspiration from, it’s Batman The Animated Series . Especially because two of the leads in Birds of Prey, Rene Montoya (Rosie Perez) and Harley Quinn, were characters that were created on Batman The Animated Series and eventually made their jump into the comic books. One of the things I disliked about Suicide Squad was how little they used Harley’s story from Batman The Animated Series. The film didn’t have any interest in showcasing the fascinating and complex relationship that developed between Harley and The Joker, while she was treating him as a psychiatrist at Arkham. Suicide Squad also opted to use an inferior, new origin for Harley that had recently been showcased at the time in a DC Comics revamp, instead of using the superior transformation from Dr. Harleen Quinzell into Harley Quinn that we saw in The Animated Series, (for what little they showed of her origin and her relationship with The Joker at all).

Then there are the problems with the villains in the movie. I love seeing Ewan McGregor in a DC movie, I just wish he was playing a more interesting character than Black Mask (and what seems to be an extremely loose interpretation of Black Mask at that). There was a rumor a while back that Ewan McGregor would feature in the rumored Justice League Dark movie where he was supposedly going to play either John Constantine or Jason Blood/Etrigan The Demon. McGregor would have been amazing in either of those roles and they’re both far more interesting than Black Mask. Which brings me to another double edge sword presented by this film. I like the inclusion of lesser used Batman villains like Roman Sionus a.k.a. Black Mask and Victor Zsasz, but they seem to be different enough from their comic book counterparts to wonder why they were included at all. I understand what works on the comic book page may not work on the big screen and certain things get lost in translation, especially from one medium to another. Sometimes those changes can even be for the better. However, it seems like these characters are Black Mask and Zsasz in name only, so why bother to use them? I could be wrong, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

To wrap things up, I’ve seen more negatives than positives when it comes to Birds Of Prey, so my expectations are pretty low going into this. But sometimes the best movie going experiences happen when your expectations for a film are in the toilet and the movie pleasantly surprises you.

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Birds of Prey hits theaters 2/7/20

-Paul