Movies
[Review] Entertaining ‘Birds of Prey’ Brings Clunky, Bone-Shattering Violence to Girls’ Night Out
After a scene-stealing turn in Suicide Squad, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) gets her own feature to play. Not even her psychopathic lover, the Joker, can take the spotlight away from her- they’ve broken up. To ensure the audience knows upfront not to keep watch for “Mr. J,” Birds of Prey begins with a cutesy animated opening that explains Harleen Quinzel’s life story up through her broken love life. Without Joker’s protection, Harley’s amassed a lot of enemies ready to cash in on karma, so learning how to live on her own post-break-up has a dual meaning here. As she makes new friends and enemies, it becomes clear that girls’ night out for our favorite cheerful lunatic means bone-crunching bloodshed and violence to pair with her tacos and margaritas.
That’s just the basic setup. The actual plot, as the film unfurls it, is as convoluted and messy and Harley Quinn’s scattered brain. Director Cathy Yan jumps around haphazardly in time, from hours ago to weeks ago, and back, then to ‘80s Sicily for a measure, as she tries to introduce all of the players in this ladies ensemble. Harley might have center stage, but Dinah Lance/Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) isn’t far behind her. Lance happens to be an employee of the movie’s big bad, Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), but she’s also assisting Detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) on the sly. Lance also has a bond with young neighbor Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), a pick-pocketing thief whose ways get her in way more trouble than she ever intended to find. Then there’s The Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an intriguing but poorly handled character shoehorned into the plot. She deserves better.
Clunky plot and character work aside, Birds of Prey wants to make it abundantly clear that fun is on the menu. Keeping the frustrations of the plot at bay becomes a lot easier thanks to the cast’s performances and the multiple running gags that stick their landing. Robbie’s manic energy imbues life, but McGregor’s tongue-in-cheek flamboyant take on Sionis is a scene-stealer. Smollett-Bell’s soulful take on Black Canary gives us emotional rooting interest, and Winstead’s albeit far-too-short appearances show off endearing comedic chops. That doesn’t even touch upon the gags involving a breakfast sandwich, Huntress practicing her intro to bad guys in the mirror, or Harley being Harley when not in combat mode.
Despite the high level of fun, and the candy-coated style, Birds of Prey leans hard into its R-rating. This movie gets unexpectedly violent. Harley, a roller derby enthusiast, loves crunching bones. Adores it. Huntress is rather fond of stabbing and slaying with crossbows. Sionis is one ruthless big bad, primarily through his right-hand man Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina), a sadistic creep with a penchant for skillfully skinning flesh. He’s a collector of faces in particular. The bubblegum pop-irreverence-meets-brutal-violence tone works far better than it should.
Eventually, the narrative finally ties all the players and plot threads together to deliver one satisfying finale. The set pieces, the energy, and the magnetic cast finally getting to play off each other as a dysfunctional unit makes you wish this came far earlier in the script. It’s so bloody and entertaining that it almost erases the flaws that came before. Almost. Satisfying finish or not, much of this story needed some extra finesse. Or maybe a lot of it. Fun gags aside, much of the first half feels empty and unnecessarily complicated. Most of the characters only feel like fleshed-out characters through the talent that plays them, as they aren’t given a lot of development or depth otherwise. The narrative structure seems to hint that the scattered telling is the fault of its unreliable narrator, but with an ensemble, that excuse becomes less believable.
Still, Harley and the gang bring a high-level of entertainment to the proceedings, and the surprising violence makes for a warm welcome in a superhero (or anti-heroine) flick. Sticklers for plot and character work will find themselves frustrated, but for those simply looking to enjoy tacos and bloodletting with a fun group of maniacs, Birds of Prey scratches that itch and then some. It offers up a disturbing cartoonish romp that brings enough thrills to elicit enough interest for the next ladies’ night.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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