Cathy Yan’s technicolor supervillainess saga shakes off the weight of 2016’s loathsome Suicide Squad. Read our full review:
, was perhaps most famous for what we didn’t end up seeing much of:that had Leto reportedly mailing dead animals to his co-stars to really get into character. Many of the Joker’s scenes were ultimately cut from the film, but his dumb stink still lingered in the film; all that sweaty effort to do something edgy and subversive tainted an already plenty tainted project., that’s all gone, because Harley has broken up with Mr. J and is now left to her own devices.
At the center of Yan’s melee is Robbie, who has to strike a tricky balance. The problem of a movie like, is that it installs a homicidal maniac as its protagonist and then, due to the conventions of big-budget filmmaking, asks that we root for them. So, is this supervillain really all that super? How wicked are they really supposed to be?kind of fails in that arithmetic, as most attempts do, but Robbie nonetheless tries her damndest to get the calculus right.
Think of her New Yawk-ish accent in the movie as representative of her whole performance. At first it sounds all wrong, unevenly applied and too cartoonish. But by the end of the movie, you’ve gotten used to it, even endeared. That’s what Robbie does with Harley on the whole, either reshaping her performance as she goes or just plugging away until she’s worn us down. She vacillates between sad and petulant quite well, and pulls off Yan’s many thunking, cracking fight sequences with aplomb.
There’s a righteous vengeance in all that pummeling, as Harley and her new friends exact reprisal on all the bad men who would seek to crush them. That unsubtle spirit of empowerment mostly plays well. All the violence is proportionate to the outsized stakes of the world in which this story takes place; Yan is careful to delineate that this is not exactly our universe, where breaking someone’s legs is rarely the solution to anything.
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