109 min | R | February 7, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Harley Quinn dumps the Joker and instantly loses the only protection she had. Every criminal she ever crossed comes collecting, so she reluctantly bands together with four women who hate her almost as much as they hate Gotham’s men. The plot is a mess. The attitude is the whole point.
Harley Quinn dumps the Joker. The split strips away the one thing that kept Gotham’s criminals from killing her. His name was her armor and now that armor is gone. Every man she ever wronged comes for her at once. Cathy Yan’s film is about a woman who realizes her entire identity was borrowed from a violent man and decides to build a new one out of spite. The story it tells is messy on purpose and messy by accident in equal measure.
Margot Robbie plays Harley Quinn as pure id with a Brooklyn yelp, narrating her own story out of sequence because she cannot hold a thought straight. Robbie commits to the chaos without ever softening it into something cute. Ewan McGregor plays Roman Sionis as a preening crime boss whose charm curdles into cruelty the moment anyone tells him no, and Chris Messina plays his henchman Victor Zsasz with a quiet menace that outdoes his employer. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Helena Bertinelli as a deadpan assassin who has rehearsed her vengeance speech too many times. Jurnee Smollett gives Dinah Lance a weary moral center, and Rosie Perez plays Renee Montoya as a burnt-out cop who talks like a character from an old TV procedural. Ella Jay Basco grounds the ensemble as Cassandra Cain, a young pickpocket who becomes the thing every villain is chasing.
Cathy Yan directs with a neon palette that drenches Gotham in pink, gold, and electric blue. Christina Hodson writes the script as a scrapbook narrated by Harley, jumping back and forth to explain who hates her and why. The structure mirrors its lead. It is impulsive and it doubles back constantly. The action choreography is the strongest craft on display. The funhouse climax stages its melee in long, legible takes, and a glitter cannon lets you track every blow.
The film works best when it stops pretending to have a plot and just lets Harley careen. Hodson’s script scatters its energy across too many origin stories and never makes them cohere into one. The pieces are sharp. The whole is loose. What holds it together is Robbie and a clear point of view about women who have spent their lives being defined by violent men. That point of view carries a movie that has far more style than structure.