Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is supposed to be an upcoming superhero movie based on the DC Comics team, Birds of Prey. However, if you watched this trailer, you would find yourself thinking, “Are you sure about that, DC?” because it is 97% Harley Quinn, 2% Ewan McGregor, and 1% anything even remotely to do with the Birds of Prey.
Watching this trailer does not give you the main things a trailer is supposed to give you —including the actual plot. In fact, without the IMDb/Wikipedia page, I’d have no idea what this movie was supposed to be about — and that’s coming from someone who has read the Birds of Prey comics.
This film is about to be a train wreck, and that’s putting it nicely. For starters, despite their grossly misrepresented relationship in Suicide Squad (2016), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and the Joker (Jared Leto) have broken up and it was apparently serious enough that she hates him and throws knives at pictures of him in her apartment? No backstory on the how or why, though, because why would we need that?
Anyway.
We also have crime lord Roman Sionis a.k.a. Black Mask (Ewan McGregor), who is out to get Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco) because she “comes across a diamond” that belongs to him, and the only reason I know that is because of said Wikipedia page. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have any clue why Roman Sionis has an issue with Harley Quinn.
We’re also supposed to believe that Harley Quinn is the one who started the Birds of Prey and got everyone together in the first place. What? Why? How? How does ANY of this work to come together and make sense for a plot? Again, I must reiterate the lack of appearance/blink and you miss it moments of any of the actual Birds of Prey members, such as Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) and Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) in the trailer. It’s mostly just Harley Quinn wearing weird, overly sexual outfits for no reason, explosions, and Roman Sionis slowly transitioning into Black Mask I guess.
I try really hard not to let my comic-reading bias dictate my opinions about upcoming superhero movies, but even so, I just can’t find anything about this trailer that makes me think this is going to be a good film, that goes for comic and non-comic readers.
