Harley Quinn! Harely Quinn! The only name you need

Rating: 6/10 (16 August 2016)

I wanted to like this film, an insane mix of DC's bad guys & gals, throw in a new Joker. What's not to like? Well quite a lot actually, which I will come to, but then I gave it 6 stars. Why would I give a film I was unimpressed with an above average score? In a word Margot Robbie (aka Harley Quinn). Quite simply she makes the film (with a little support from Jared Leto's Joker). She's mad as a box of gun totting frogs and utterly at home with that (aside from one forgivable dream sequence). It is hard not to like her cheery psychotic disposition, which takes a battering but is never broken. In so many films where you have a "strong" female lead they are there to endure great hardship or to out bloke the blokes. And while it is true that Harley Quinn shares a blokey love of violence really she is just out to have (twisted) fun. In this she has a lot more in common with Tank Girl (the comic not the film) than he co-female characters (Amanda Waller, Enchantress, Katana) who are all, well, a bit serious. I could have watched an entire film featuring just Harley Quinn and Joker and given it a resounding 10 but, alas, it was not to be. So what was wrong? Well to be honest although the premise was good(ish) and Cara Delevingne's Enchantress a great tragic villain, and Viola Davis gave a good performance as Amanda Waller, and Jared Leto was fascinating as the Joker..in the end the whole was just a bit too clichéd. There was nothing at all sympathetic about the "good guys". We had sadistic prison guards (yawn), troubled soldier Rick Flag with a tangled love interest (ho hum) and endless fight scenes against anonymous attackers which were just like any other mass fight scene ever filmed. CGI was OK but nothing special these days. Will Smith's Deadshot was a positively pedestrian "bad-guy-with-heart-of –gold", single parent assassin with teen daughter whom he adores. Adam Beach's Slipknot might just as well have worn a red star trek jumper. As for the rest they were either one dimensional caricatures or just blended into the back ground. I tell a lie, Jay Hernandez did a good, if clichéd, performance as Diablo. It could have been so much more. I raise a glass to Robbie, she may be slight but she must have damn good muscles 'cause she carried the whole film. And finally who in their right mind would think it a good idea to give unstable psychotics guns and expect them to behave? I mean seriously?