Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. There is still
sickness in my family, and we all keep on fighting with each other, making sure
that we all feel worse. Human beings are complicated, my family is my family,
and I hate my life. Ergo, I look for ways to escape it, and what I find is the
second ‘Birds of Prey’ (DC Movie) trailer. Yay?
Let me just point it out – I liked the first trailer better,
this one seems to be the new old ‘Suicide Squad’ movie with a mostly female
cast that seems to be developing into an inferior version of ‘Ocean’s 8’ movie
instead. The film in question wasn’t so bad, it just was a reboot slash remake
of the original ‘Ocean 11’, just with much more girl power, and just like
‘Charlie’s Angels-2019’ film, (itself a reboot of the 2003 CA film that no one
talked about just because, cough), ‘Ocean’s 8’ never developed into anything
more, even though it was much more compact, proportionally speaking, than
‘Hellboy-2019, for example. Where were we?
Oh yeah, ‘Birds of Prey’ are in-between Scylla and
Charybdis. On one hand, there’s the established ‘Harley Queen’ cartoon for
grown-ups, which is already dealing with ‘the fantabulous emancipation of
Harley’, literally, among other meanings, but because it is a cartoon series,
it can better pace itself and take its’ time to do that, unlike the ‘Birds of
Prey’ film, which can’t, because of the differences between a film and a
cartoon series. However, on the other hand, today’s trailer, (aka Jan 9),
revealed that the film may have problems with its’ own.
First, there is no Poison Ivy. While that is not a problem,
it is a disappointment – these days DC comics have made Harley and Ivy
practically gay BFFs, if not an outright couple. The HQ cartoon seems to be
working in this direction as well; yes, it is taking its’ time, again, but it
uses this time to give both Harley and her new crew character development, (not
to mention the Bat-family, of course), and it does a good job of it too! We are
talking the complete opposite of the old ‘Suicide Squad’ film here. Put
otherwise, while Harley is slowly becoming emancipated, (alongside Ivy), Dr.
Psycho is becoming less crude and toxically masculine, King Shark is leaning to
stand up for himself, a giant anthropomorphic shark or not, and Clayface is
beginning to come into his own as well – and at the same time their depictions,
initial and derived, are still fairly consistent with those in the DC comics,
whereas in the trailer…
In the trailer, we got Harley, who is directly transplanted
from her ‘Suicide Squad’ flashback depiction, (cough Jared Leto left DC
franchise in a bad way cough), we got Huntress and Black Canary who seem to be
only coming into their superhero selves, (not that that’s a problem), we got a
bespectacled Renee Montoya, (which is very different from how she is usually
depicted in the DC comics), and finally we got Cassandra Cain. In the DC
comics, Cass is Batgirl, and one of the most formidable members of Batman’s
crew. She is also a mostly silent semi-homeless ninja, because it is comics.
Here, in the trailer, she seems to be nothing more than a pickpocket who begins
to look up to Harley as the movie develops, (or this is how it looks like in
this trailer), someone, who is more like Linus from ‘Ocean’s 11’ or Constance
from ‘Ocean’s 8’. Why?
Because DC and co. could, that is why. Fair enough, they own
the franchise, they can reboot their characters however they like, but the
problem is that it’s not necessarily a good thing either: Disney rebooted the
SW franchise after the SW8 film in order to appease the fans – the ‘fan
service’ – but the resulted SW9 film wasn’t really an improvement either.
Official-unofficial mouthparts for the Big Mouse may claim that the SW fans do
not know what they want, but somehow when George Lucas had been in charge, he
never had that problem, not even in the prequel trilogy, and everyone knows it.
He also – and now it is officially known – did not like the SW9 movie when he
saw it, so there is that. SW – or at least its’ sequel trilogy – has ended with
a whimper rather than a bang.
This brings us back to the ‘Birds of Prey’ movie. Just as
the SW9 movie tried to distance itself from its’ predecessor, so ‘Birds of Prey’ is setting itself to be
apart from both the old ‘Suicide Squad’ movie and its upcoming reboot. The SW9
movie did succeed…just in wrong ways…so who has to say that ‘Birds of Prey’
won’t? DC had a bad run with movies, until ‘Wonder Woman’, and ‘Shazam’, and
‘Aquaman’, and to a lesser extent – with ‘Suicide Squad’. It was not a great
movie, but neither was it horrible, so where this leave ‘Birds of Prey’ does is
anyone’s guess. If MCU makes great movies, and everything else is second rate,
with DCEU it is the other way around – the movies are usually the underdogs in
this franchise. Considering that the ‘Harley Queen’ cartoon, (also a part of
the DC franchise, remember), is proving that – it is very good, in my opinion –
then the ‘Birds of Prey’ film need to struggle twice as much and twice as hard
to top it…period. Otherwise, they will end up as the old ‘Suicide Squad’ did –
maybe not as a bad movie, but one that is flawed, and mocked for those flaws
all the same. Real life – and it includes movie critics, (just look at ‘Cats-2019’)
– sucks, remember?
This is it for now; see you all soon!
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