In the Flesh: Birds of Prey

There are four action scenes of note in Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey. The second of these, in which Harley Quinn (Margo Robbie) stages a one-woman raid on a Gotham police station, is the film’s best. A bean bag launcher complete with colored smoke and confetti packed into each shell punctuates each shot with cartoonish flair, and Yan eschews the kind of back-and-forth cutting so typical of Hollywood action in favor of quick, varied shots from a multitude of angles. The feeling is not unlike something out of an early Jackie Chan flick, Police Story or Drunken Master, and if it lacks the fluid clarity of these classics it at least captures their manic energy, their sense of weight and motion. The scene’s back half, in which Harley uses a baseball bat and the magic of cocaine to beat the tar out of a biker gang among the overflowing shelves of an evidence lockup, is equally unpretentious and fun.

The film’s big set piece fight, its last, is a mixed bag. The funhouse antics of the brawl in the abandoned amusement park are harried and logistically cut up by confusing set design, far from awful but lacking the sharp sensibilities of its earlier action. The staging is at times unclear and the relative positions of the characters feels hazy. There are standout moments — Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) riding a corpse down a play-place slide, Harley knocking the top of a thug’s head off with a colorful mallet — but its overall emotional and directional arc is somewhat muddled. The scene into which it leads, a riotous car/motorcycle/roller skate chase, is pure giddy fun, and the sexual thrill of seeing Harley, on roller skates, straddling the front of a Huntress’s motorcycle while the machine is going full bore is enough to make you leave tooth marks in your fist.

Birds of Prey’s first action scene is another chase, and while it’s lively and chaotic it couldn’t be more different from its last. Harley, hungover and trying to find the time to eat a breakfast sandwich, blitzes down busy alleyways and through crowds of confused shoppers and commuters as the multitude of people she wronged in the film’s first fifteen minutes come out of the woodwork for a shot at her newly vulnerable skin. The whole thing converges into a deeply stupid and incredibly satisfying Rube Goldberg pileup of intersecting fuckups which leaves Harley, who here has more in common with Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner than with her famous boyfriend, smirking on top of the wreckage. Pure fuckin’ fun.