Entertainment
The COVID Era Super-Action Movie Everyone Missed, And Why It's Worth Streaming Now
Goofy and ridiculous, fast-paced and fun, Birds of Prey leans harder than expected into its R-rating. All to its benefit.
By Brent McKnight
| Published
Even the most die-hard fans usually admit Suicide Squad is a mess. This makes sense when, after the fact, we heard stories of major studio interference, multiple edits, and all kinds of meddling. Still, one of the high points is that it introduced us to Margot Robbie’s incarnation of Harley Quinn.
A frenetic blast of chaotic energy as part of an ensemble, she returned to try her hand at leading a movie herself in director Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. It’s a fine time. Goofy and ridiculous, fast-paced and fun, Birds of Prey leans harder than expected into its R-rating. All to its benefit.
“Goofy and ridiculous, fast-paced and fun, it leans harder than expected into its R-rating. All to its benefit.”
– -Brent McKnight, GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT’s Birds Of Prey Review
Harley Quinn Needs To Get Herself Right
In the wake of earlier events, Harley Quinn needs to get herself right. A large part of this means severing ties to her longtime paramour, the Joker. Let’s just say, maybe she’s not emotionally equipped to deal with a breakup in a rational, healthy fashion, and her way of dealing with self-doubt and being let down and dismissed goes spectacularly off the rails.
One of the main drawbacks of this emancipation is that Harley no longer has the protection her association with Mr. J. afforded her. As a result, the many, many, many parties she’s aggrieved over the years come out of the woodwork for a spot of payback. Chief among these are crime boss Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), also known as the Black Mask, and his gleefully sadistic sidekick/life partner Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina).
Forming The Birds Of Prey
Through a convoluted series of events and a desire for self-preservation, Harley strikes an uneasy alliance with a crew of other women that includes Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Dinah Lance (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), better known as Black Canary, and the young pickpocket Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco).
The plot of Birds of Prey basically serves as a swirling mass to push these women together. Each has been damaged and marginalized in her own way. No one views Harley as anything but a sidekick to be tolerated. Montoya starts out as a cop, only to, time and again, be passed over for promotion, have her ideas ignored or stolen by the men around her, and never seen as an equal. A foster kid lost and forgotten by the system, Cassandra does what she has to in order to survive. Trapped in a thankless job, Dinah’s bosses only use her for what they can. Huntress has her own reasons for revenge and issues with people taking her seriously.
Great Performances Worth Watching
Their chemistry is both antagonistic and sisterly as they realize over the course of Birds of Prey that they need to work together. Harley is unhinged and manic, but also surprisingly earnest and heartfelt, with an undying love for breakfast sandwiches. Robbie has an absolute blast fronting the picture.
Montoya is a tough, cliché-spouting detective, but Perez brings a nuanced world-weariness and palpable frustration at the glass ceiling to the surface. Basco and Smollett-Bell are tough and funny. Everyone gets enough to do, and no one feels shortchanged or flat.
As great as the others are, however, Winstead gets the MVP trophy. Huntress may be a leather-clad badass tearing around town on a roided-out motorcycle, but she’s also dealing with a deep trauma that left her fueled by rage and emotionally stunted. She’s super awkward, and her social ineptitude leads to some of the best bits in the movie.
McGregor and Messina are the perfect baddies and foils, managing to be both comic book-y and authentically terrifying at the same time. McGregor dives headfirst into scene-chewing villainy, both over-the-top flamboyant and blood-chilling. Messina plays Zsasz almost as deranged as Harley—he’ll peel off your face and giggle with childish glee the whole time. The pair has a fantastic dynamic, power-hungry and vicious, but also earnest and romantic.
Where Birds Of Prey Goes Wrong
Birds of Prey does have a few narrative hiccups. Too often early on, Christina Hodson’s script pulls the “Just a minute, let’s rewind” trick to introduce key players. Though a bit clunky initially, that thankfully dissipates after the first act.
From there, the film does a solid job of balancing the various threads and arcs—we never lose sight of anyone for any significant stretch. Even the speedbumps are relatively minor, and a brisk pace and rapid tempo carry us through without stumbling.
John Wick Level Fight Scenes?
The action in Bird of Prey is strong and coherent, better than most superhero movies with a fraction of the budget of its counterparts. Since the movie doesn’t generally deal with powered folks, it’s also one of the most grounded and realistic of the DC movies.
Yan brought in the team from 87eleven Action Design, the company founded by Chad Stahelski and David Leitch—the filmmakers behind John Wick, among many other standout action movies—and it shows. As a result, the elaborate fights sequences are meticulously staged and tightly choreographed.
Because it’s more reality-based kind of action, these scenes never devolve into muddy, CGI-heavy jumbles where bodies flip around and look like videogame cut scenes—an issue that plagues so many superhero movies. Even as a climactic chase cranks things up to bonkers levels, there remains an edge of realism and practicality that sells them the world of Birds of Prey even more.
R-Rated And Proud
Thanks to an R-rating, Birds of Prey never shies away from violence or vulgarity. Yan and company balance a bubble-gum pop aesthetic with raw, visceral brutality. They’re certainly not afraid to break a few bones or crack a dirty joke, which only adds to the party.
Not every movie needs to come from the same template or play like the next chapter in a bigger story. There’s room for dark and dour, like Batman v Superman, as well as the bug-nuts spectacle of Aquaman. We can get a wash of greys one time and an eye-popping burst of Day-Glo the next, and each has its place with stories that play to a property’s strengths.
That’s what Birds of Prey does best, it knows what it’s all about and goes for it. Harley is ditzy and violent but also has a Ph.D., a duality that shines through. This is a story of broken hearts and broken bones, of female friendship and bonding through shared struggles, of crazy action and earnest connection. Most of all, it’s a good time.
BIRDS OF PREY REVIEW SCORE
Birds of Prey is available to stream free on Max for subscribers and available for rental on other streaming platforms.
Entertainment
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Credit: BJ’s Wholesale Club
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Entertainment
This $43 bundle quietly upgrades your entire PC experience
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Mashable Deals
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
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