Colorful, vast and sneakingly hilarious

Wes Anderson is back with a stacked cast and a story set in a desert town post-WWII at a convention for students and parents from all across the country that gets interrupted by world-changing events.

Quite an ominous logline for a film that tells you most of its story and mystery (maybe even its jokes) in the first few minutes of the movie.

Wes Anderson seems to be confident that this gigantic ensemble of very Wes Anderson-like characters will carry this movie enough to make it enjoyable. And for the most part, it is, even if there are quite a few Anderson stereotypes that I don´t particularly enjoy, like in insistence on an additional framing device for his stories.

Because Asteroid City could have cut its nameworthy cast in half, focused on the family dynamics a bit more, and made this one of his best films yet. Don´t get me wrong though, Asteroid City is very good. It's hilarious and had me laugh throughout the entire runtime. It started to lose me a bit more in the 2nd half after a very strong opening and Parts 1 and 2 but ultimately I believe that Wes Anderson fans are gonna be pleased. It's a definite step up from the mess in The French Dispatch, even if this film is still quite messy.

The cast is huge, with Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson as the most lead-like characters, followed by Schwartzman´s kid, played by Jake Ryan.

as for the rest of the cast, from Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Liev Schreiber, Maya Hawke to Margot Robbie. There's no real need for them at all in this story and ultimately makes the most dense cameo-fest I have ever seen. A lot of them feel like caricatures of Wes Anderson characters, which can be funny if there's one or two of them, but works a bit less when there are like a dozen.

Regardless, the humor and look are probably the film´s strongest virtues and I personally got a bit annoyed by the beep-like repetitive score. He's certainly one of the few filmmakers where I can tolerate that kind of soundscape.

Some of the back and forth between the frame device story of the film was actually really funny, Bryan Cranston nails that role, and the younger triplet sister pack was hilarious each time they were on strong

Birds of Prey (And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is director Cathy Yan’s first feature-length debut and Margot Robbie’s return to Cupic Of Crime herself, Harley Quinn. The film takes place in the loosely connected DC cinematic universe in which the critical flop Suicide Squad introduced Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn. This is really her film and even though the titular team of Birds of Prey was the advertised focus of the movie the majority of the runtime is spent with all of these characters either working against or separate from each other. At this point, it should be mentioned that if you want to go into this film without knowing anything about the plot, be warned, there might be slight spoilers ahead.

Alongside Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, there are the three members of the Birds of Prey with Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Dinah Lance/Black Canary and Rosie Perez as Det. Rene Montaya. Although as mentioned before, there’s not a lot of teaming up in this film. It reminded me of Deadpool 2 and that brief fake-out X-Force team-up. X-Force (and the Electrifying Vanishing of a Brad Pitt cameo). Birds of Prey shares quite a few things with the plot and character of the second Deadpool installment. The often unreliable narration with frequent time jumps and freeze frame exposition dumps, a kid being hunted that needs protecting, and a group of misfits teaming up. But at least Harley wasn’t as persistent on the pop culture references.

Margot Robbie’s charismatic performance and the highly stylized and surprisingly violent fight scenes are the most entertaining aspects of the movie. Even though the overused slow-motion speed ramping does become noticing at times. From Harley Quinn’s psychologically unstable perspective we get an unreliable narrator that jumps back and forth in time as a reflection on Quinn’s incapability to focus on telling a story from beginning to end. Or it might be a way to make this rather simple plot appear to be a bit more than just a dragged out MacGuffin chase featuring one-dimensional secondary characters with motivations like ‘oh no don’t kill the neighbor kid’ or ‘revenge’. Even the most interesting character, which was Winstead’s Helena Bertinelli aka Crossbow Killer aka The Huntress, ended up becoming a comic relief character and wasn’t used up to her true potential.

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Birds of Prey left a rather underwhelming impression on me. However, I have to say that Ewan McGregor seemed to have had a blast overacting in every scene he was in. It was honestly the most consistently funny thing for me in the film. When it comes to his character Roman Sionis aka Black Mask there’s not much to mention other than a statement I have previously made about the poking fun at stereotypical movie tropes: just because you acknowledge that your writing is lazy and bad doesn’t make it funny or original.

Child actors are a pet peeve of mine. It wasn’t just the scenes with Ella Jay Basco’s Cassandra Cain that fell flat most of the time. There’s a scene with Ewan McGregor in which his insanity is supposed to be showcased, but all it made me do is cringe and laugh because it was so awkward and misplaced. For Cassandra Cain, the laughable over-the-top acting isn’t an option because her role is to ground Harley and everyone else and be the audiences’ vessel to sanity. But her acting is just straight-up bad and took me out of the story multiple times.

The story goes the way you expect a story like this to go and although I enjoyed the explosion of colors with green and pink everywhere the tonal inconsistencies were too frequent to turn a blind eye.

Should I watch this? If you are been entertained by the likes of Deadpool or got a least a pinch of enjoyment out of Suicide Squad there’s a good chance you are going to enjoy returning to Robbie’s portrayal of Harls. If you, however, disliked the above-mentioned movies I’d suggest skipping this one. It’s fun, dumb and entertaining.

★★☆☆☆

Birds of Prey ranks somewhere in the middle of the post-Nolan Dark Knight trilogy DC movie universe. Most performances are decent at best and the predictable and formulaic plot renders the movie forgettable.

Swiss Release Date: 06.02.2020

Film data: Director: Cathy Yan - Writer: Christina Hodson - Cast: Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ewan McGregor, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Derek Wilson, Steven Williams, Chris Messina, Charlene Amoia, Rosie Perez, Ali Wong - USA - 109’