DC, You Seem Addicted to Letting Me Down. It's Time We Talk.
Blogging is not all that important an occupation. I almost feel better about myself having not made any money at it. My day job and other business pursuits are work that actually matters. Devoting words and time to this movie seems a pointless waste of time as I sit here at work on a Saturday morning (I’m a salaried employee and put in way more than my expected hours by Friday’s COB) waiting for my subordinates to finish their assigned tasks. But I’m going to anyway, if only to steer a weary traveler from this faux oasis of a movie.
The DC movie machine just can’t seem to find its sea legs. DC Studios is like that weird uncle who’s still trying to figure things out and friends with a redheaded stepchild who’s pen pals with that guy who’s changed his college major four times. It’s irritating. Shrugging it off and saying “We are quirky and you just don’t get it” is an intellectually dishonest argument summarily cancelled out by their multitude of studio head, writer, director, and star shake-ups and shuffling.
The Joker, while featuring a fine performance from its star, was not much of a movie beyond Joaquin Phoenix. Watching Aquaman I imagined eight 15-year-old boys sitting in the writers’ room saying “That’d be awesome to include in our movie!”. That movie drafted Big-Budget Ridiculous in the first round. Justice League wasted too much potential to accurately measure. The clinically depressed vision Zach Snyder had in mind for the DCEU actually seems like a boon now. He knew how to pick a lane, direct an action sequence, and approximate real-life drama. Wonder Woman and Shazam! stand hand-in-hand as movies that have their stuff together. Rule, meet Exception that proves you. Even those films have clunky dialogue, awkward cheesiness, and pointless characters. Wonder Woman 1984 seems promising but falls prey to the comic book trope of bringing a beloved character back from the dead, thereby canceling out the emotional heft of the first movie. The MCU has its quirky directors, its tonal shifts, adherence to tired comic book tropes, studio shake-ups, discarding source material for modern sensibilities, and its bribes tendered to the Diversity Police. It also has fleshed out characters, female-driven cinema, compelling story lines, truly funny humor, genuine human reactions to dramatic life events, exciting melodrama, and consistent box office returns.
Birds of Prey; while garnering many positive reviews from those who liked it, is just insanely dumb. Not even fun dumb. You know, like the truly funny guy who makes jokes at the wrong time at a funeral.
I have and always will posit that film reviews should judge a movie based on its entertainment value. I don’t judge movies based on a “woke” report card, the Bechdel Test, political agenda, adherence to/bucking of social norms, or other shenanigans. I judge it based on whether it made me laugh, reflect, cry, or be frightened. So I won’t be talking about female empowerment (as if a bunch of murdering psychopaths should even be considered in that conversation), tone deaf chauvinism, male and female stereotypes and gender roles, or any such nonsense that belongs in social critique writing, not movie reviews.
This is an awful movie. Plain and simple. I’m sure it was meant to shake off the post-January blockbuster season (Bad Boys for Life and Shazam! both did a better job of that). It doesn’t. It would appear the writers took copious notes during Deadpool as this movie rips off that one’s plot, style, tone, crazy protagonist, action choreography, vaguely effeminate male villain, timeline-shifting construction, and fourth wall breaks. Deadpool’s protagonist shoots and slashes his way through armies of villains who can’t hurt him due to his powers. This movie’s protagonist pulls a one-woman assault on a police station full of cowering, obese, white male policemen who forget they have guns and a numbers advantage with a clunky glitter bag launcher that holds one round at a time and takes her like, forever to reload. No T-800 taking on the police with a grenade launcher and mini-gun, thou.
I laughed all the way through Deadpool. I rolled my eyes through this one. Even the best moment of this film; a cocaine-fueled Popeye spinach moment, is followed by an overlong, redundant, and laughably bad action sequence. The climax of the movie is also overly long, redundant (how many slow-motion leg sweeps and small-armed haymakers thrown at muscle-bound anonymous henchmen do we really need?), and laughably bad action sequence. Characters even make comments throughout this movie about how a character is being a stereotypical character from a movie of the same genre. This isn’t charmingly quirky. It disengages the audience. Rosie Perez appears to want to do one movie of note every ten years but is far too old and weak at acting to portray a believable jaded, tortured, alcoholic cop-turned-vigilante. At one point, she literally gives subordinate police a directive who literally turns to her white male partner for the go-ahead. Yay! We can throw feminist sermonizing in your face and you can’t do anything about it, short of walking out. In which case, we still have your money and you can’t write a thorough and intellectually honest review of our dreadful movie. We win!
Deadpool also didn’t have enough overacting and limited range acting to fill…some sort of metaphorical overacting and limited range acting-containing vessel. All this is to say, it’s time for the friends of DC to throw an intervention.
There are some bright spots, just not enough to warrant a positive rating or recommendation.
Huntress has a laser focus on her super-objective and extreme difficulty connecting emotionally with others, or even showing the proper emotion on her face in the moment. As a father of two autistic children, I smiled at this. But it’s ruined by some on-the-nose “what do I do now that my life goal has been accomplished” dialogue during which she might as well be looking straight at the camera lens; which Harley Quinn does on several occasions, even winking at the audience at one point.
The MacGuffin is inventive enough but turns out to be a big nothing once it’s recovered and traded.
The ladies appear to be doing a lot of their own stunts and having fun at it, albeit in a scene stolen from the forgettable Batman Forever’s Robin facing down a gang of neon-masked thugs. But once again, too much pre-cog twirling and ducking pulled me away from truly feeling this movie. I did enjoy the utilization of roller skates (and Margot Robbie’s stunt work) in the climax. That is so Harley Quinn. Again, it’s ruined by a character saying out loud what should be left unsaid so as to let the joke land properly on its feet. I once read a clever quip about Robert Rodriguez only being able to direct purposefully made schlock and therefore not being able to be taken seriously as a director. This movie should have been directed by him, despite his status as a male and this a feminist female-empowerment vehicle. Raspberries! I promised I wasn’t going to talk about that kind of stuff.
Oh well. They said they would give me a quality movie and they broke their promise too.
