Mesmerising
Margot Robbie returns as the hyperactive supervillain in a crass but weirdly watchable spin-off from Suicide Squad
Watching Birds of Prey, a line from the recent
Fox News sexual harassment drama Bombshell occurred to me – when Kate McKinnon looks deep into Margot Robbie’s eyes over cocktails and says, wonderingly: “That’s quite some face you’ve got there.” And it is. Robbie’s capacity for pop-eyed, crazy-cyborg grinning is certainly put to work in this weirdly watchable hyperactive supervillain
comedy, an ADHD-aspartame overload written by Christina Hodson and directed by Cathy Yan.
It’s a spin-off from DC’s little-loved Suicide Squad, in which Robbie plays Harley Quinn, clothed in an eccentric kick-ass variant on nymphet: Lolita meets Cynthia Rothrock. She was the inamorata of Jared Leto’s Joker in that film and now returns as an antiheroine in her own right.