Will Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn be the first superhero of the #MeToo era?

Margot Robbie

Will Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn be the first superhero of the #MeToo era?

The character’s depiction in Suicide Squad left a bad taste – but with her own film on the way, DC has the perfect chance to redress the balance

BEN CHILD
Thu 22 Nov 2018

T

he art of franchise course correction is an onerous one. Star Wars creator George Lucas did his best to make amends for the horrors of Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace by virtually eliminating the bumbling Gungan from Attack of the Clones – bar a brief appearance in which the hapless stalk-eyed goon rubber-stamps the rise of the evil Empire. This might have worked if Lucas hadn’t introduced whining teenager Anakin Skywalker in the same movie, as well as ruining Yoda by recreating him in CGI.

Warner Bros has already tried something similar with its current DC extended universe of comic-book movies. Faced with the backlash against a knuckle-headed, furrow-browed caped crusader in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the studio decided to reimagine the character as a wisecracking, Marvel-style good guy in sequel Justice League. Despite the best efforts of Ben Affleck and Joss Whedon, it didn’t really work out. But it doesn’t seem to have stopped the studio trying a similar approach with its forthcoming Margot Robbie-led Harley Quinn film.

Robbie took to Instagram this week to reveal that Cathy Yan’s film, which the Australian actor is producing, will be titled Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn). As an exercise in in-movie apologia, this is a bit like Christopher Nolan titling Batman Begins as So Long Robin (and Sorry About the Batnipples). Let us not forget that Robbie’s previous DCEU appearance, in Suicide Squad, saw Quinn punched then snogged by Batman and being roundly ogled by the camera for the rest of the movie. If its title is anything to go by, the new film seems to be repositioning Quinn as exactly what we were hoping she might have been the first time around: a strong, independent woman rather than a teenage boy’s pea-brained comic-book fantasy babe.

The “emancipation” in question presumably refers to Quinn’s breakup with the Joker, and there is plenty of comic-book history (as well as episodes of the classic TV show Batman: The Animated Series) to draw on here. Quinn has left the dark knight’s nemesis a number of times, and her best storylines often involve her wrenching herself from this irresistible yet abusive relationship.

The advantage for Warner Bros is that the big-screen version of Harley Quinn probably doesn’t need her puddin’ nearly so much as her forebears. While Robbie’s performance in Suicide Squad was roundly praised – she is a bona fide star, even when working with weak material – Jared Leto’s Joker failed to make much of an impression.

As a result, Warner has cast an entirely new actor, Joaquin Phoenix, to star in a standalone Joker origins movie that will not be part of the DCEU. Given that any role for the Joker in Birds of Prey is likely to be little more than a cameo – the main thrust of the film will deal with Quinn and her new gal pals coming together to save a little girl from an “evil crime lord” after she has left her cackling beau – you have to wonder how easy it will be to convince Leto to return.

In the comics, Quinn always seems to revert, sooner or later, to her origin as the Joker’s minion – or the writers find another way to put her in her placeafter a period in which she has struck out on her own. But the movies, as Marvel has shown, are a different kettle of fish. How audiences react to a comic-book character in the multiplexes is as much about the charisma of the actor and the zip of the screenplay as it is about decades of comic-book history – how else to explain both Guardians of the Galaxy movies outperforming Batman v Superman at the US box office?

In Robbie’s Quinn, DC has a firecracker of an actor in a role that has the potential to intelligently reference the #MeToo movement. And the first step of that reinvention is Warner Bros admitting, via that quirky title, how ill-rendered its previous effort turned out to be.

THE GUARDIAN