The Harley Quinn breakfast sandwich. Author photo.
Birds of Prey, Warner Bros Harley Quinn spin-off, hit theaters this week and it has been a bit of a mixed bag. Critical reactions have been good but not great, and the box office was less than the studio was hoping for. Most people have praised the film for assembling an all-girl team of anti-heroes, while noting that it seems to lack that extra punch that might have elevated it to the next level. I myself found little to like in the film - it’s formulaic, often times nonsensical, and it seems to have mistaken kitschy flair for substance. In fact, it leans so hard into becoming a cinematic embodiment of quirky personality traits that by the end of the movie I couldn’t really take it any more and I skipped the ending as I urgently had to use the restroom.
This film cannot be understood without placing it in the wider context of Warner Bros and their delirious saga to create a cinematic universe that can rival Marvel’s. Warner Bros learned exactly the wrong lesson from the success of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy - that audiences were eager for a cinematic super hero universe washed out of all color or joy. They tasked Zack Snyder with creating this dour world, then prematurely rushed it out in a half-formed version, driven by existential fear of losing out to Disney and Marvel.
The diminishing box office fortunes, and critical skewering, of Batman v Superman and Justice League (and the success of Wonder Woman, which repudiated Snyder’s vision) eventually convinced the studio that they needed to adjust their strategy. When Suicide Squad was released they were still in the midst of their corporate soul searching and it showed. Director David Ayer’s original cut of the movie was later altered by a trailer company to give it a bouncier, edgier tone - including smash cuts to video game like summaries of each character, done up in a day-glo color scheme. The movie was absolutely terrible, but Margot Robbie’s fun, funny and subversive take Harley Quinn as this sort of casual yet likable and relatable agent of chaos was a clear stand-out.
Now Warner Bros has smartly pivoted away from trying to build an extended cinematic universe to compete directly with Marvel. They are making narrower films depicting one or two characters from that universe, and giving directors room to put their own touch on the films and the characters. If this can eventually be spun-up into a massive cross-over hit later, than great - but at the moment the focus is just on doing these one-off character studies. This approach yielded the enormous success of the Joker movie, and I bet Wonder Woman 1984 will do quite well. It’s also painfully obvious this is the approach they should have pursued in the first place, rather than trying to reverse engineer a cinematic universe in a style that nobody liked, but that is neither here nor there.
Birds of Prey is another of these character spin-offs, taking a fan favorite from Suicide Squad and giving her a whole film to shine, along with an all-girl squad of plucky sidekicks looking for revenge against the patriarchy. The problem, for me, is that stylistically Birds of Prey took the wrong lesson from Suicide Squad, and it invests all its energy in recreating the “trailer” energy of those interstitials. The film just tries so hard to be edgy, and subversive and quirky that it actively annoyed me - I mean, there is even a Bernie Sanders joke shoe-horned in there, which is laying it on a bit thick. Margot Robbie is OK, but the Harley Quinn character works better as a kind of novelty weirdo in an ensemble than as the lead in this film. The supporting characters are also disappointing - Ewan McGregor as the kitschy villain was one of the worst performances in the film.
If you are going to enjoy this film, you need to buy into its style from the beginning, and I did not. If you bought into and liked it, then great. But if you’re not sold within the first few minutes, then the movie has lost you, and I was lost.
But all, it turns out, was not lost. A breakfast sandwich plays a rather prominent role in this film - which should give you some idea about what the movie considers “quirky.” Whatever you might have to say about Birds of Prey the film, the sandwich itself looked exquisite and upon leaving the theater my wife set about recreating it at our restaurant in Bali (results pictured above). It is not an exact duplicate but a beautifully runny egg, bacon, ham, cheese and caramelized onions sandwiched between two thick pieces of perfectly toasted bread - to me this sandwich is Oscar-worthy, and it is by far the best thing about this film.