Today I was at work and two people talked to me about Harley Quinn. This in itself is unusual - but then again it wasn't actually Harley Quinn, but rather Margot Robbie who happened to play one of the live action versions of her.
Someone was talking about the new Joker movie trailer and how they hoped Margot would be in it. I made a face, and they said they couldn't have a Joker movie that didn't include Harley Quinn. I disagree with this - I didn't say this but the Joker has been around for so long that it is very possible to have a Joker origin story that does not include Harley Quinn. The opposite cannot be true because the Joker is an integral component of how we GET a Harley Quinn in existence. While Harley Quinn has BECOME an important part of Joker's story since her own inception - she is not part of Joker's origin.
The other person said that Margot is awesome - and here I vocally disagreed. I said that she's not a good version of Harley Quinn seeing as how her portrayal is mostly centred around her butt - or lack thereof. Later on when discussing this discussion - another person (who knows me better) said that maybe I just didn't like Margot because I prefer classic Harley Quinn. I told him that Margot has basically taken a steaming dump on one of my favourite comic characters and is over rated.
Obviously I didn't get time to go into the nitty gritty details of my reasonings but I wanted to make a sort of essay about WHY I don't believe Margot was a good choice for Harley. If my colleagues never see it, that's fine. They're missing out but it'll help me anyway.
Now, regardless of how I feel about her actress - I think we can all agree that the Suicide Squad movie let her and the other characters down.
APPEARANCE
Previous incarnations of Harley had her in her classic jumpsuit, the one she chose when she decided to run away with the Joker. More recent iterations had her in corsets, leathers, bikinis, roller derby outfits.. you name it. Whatever she wore, it was mostly practical and for a large part - somewhat jester themed. The Suicide Squad movie chose to put Harley in ridiculous heels, short shorts that were basically sequined underpants, weird punkish/gang-like jewellery that would have no benefit and absolute risk during combat, a t-shirt that had seen better days about a hundred years ago and a jacket custom made to say that she's property. Oh, and she also did her make-up in the dark with colours that didn't make sense.
Harley has been seen before with tattoos that make sense - playing cards, diamonds, Joker's face etc. Here... she just has some grotty, hepatitis riddled prison tattoos that aren't even spelt right. One even repeats what her shirt says - in case we didn't realise that someone owns her. She has a couple of diamonds on one wrist, but they seem out of place with her current outfit. If you never knew that she used to wear diamonds on her outfit, you might wonder why she has them in the movie. Helpfully, she put 'rotten' on her jawline to assist her dentist.
She spends a lot of time in the movie being the token sex object. Now, there's nothing wrong with sexy. Sexy is fine. For example, Megan Fox in Transformers. She's hot and the audience often sees her in the male gaze - courtesy of the male protagonist - but she also holds her own against people who only see her as a sex object, we learn she's smart and has a background in cars/mechanics plus she actively contributes to the fight. At first glance you would think she is the prize for the hero to win but once you look beneath the surface you realise she is her own character and has feelings/drama/history etc.
However, Harley does not own her sexuality here, she IS owned. We see it in how she dresses, how she dances, how she's given away, how she cracks onto the guard we're supposed to see is actually terribly cruel to her, and she's the only Squad member we see in a state of undress, or bending over gratuitously. She's supposed to be smart, we never see it. She's just the T&A token female.
INFORMATION
Here's where I want to delve into what we KNOW about Harley Quinn - based off the Suicide Squad movie. Or... that is... what we're TOLD about her. Right off the bat - Waller tells us how much more fearless she is than the Joker. Crazier. Tells us that if anyone disrespected her that Joker would make them pay. Now this.. these few simple lines.. completely takes what DC has built up around the Joker for so, so many years and tosses it into the bin.
To this day, I have no idea why anyone working on this movie thought "Hey, we have the Joker in here! The infamous psychotic, Batman's greatest adversary, that guy who single-handedly killed or crippled most of the Bat-gang, the one guy other villains are scared of. You know what we should totally do? Make him a love sick puppy and his girlfriend can be the big bad! She can even help kill Robin!"
Movie Harley Quinn NEVER lives up to this hype. Oh, we're told she put several guards in the hospital (we never see this) we do see her small, shaking and being force-fed in prison. We do see her steal a handbag from an abandoned store during her wild, untamed rampage through Midway City. She headbutts and licks her cell for some reason. She skips out of duty for a drink at a bar where she serves the others. We see her following others around, seemingly having no designs on anything herself. She's used as a show for others. She's given like a gift. She takes out a few goons but nothing more than what her team mates have done. She also falls to pieces the moment she thinks her beau is dead.. but never once went to check if he was. She nearly creams her pants talking about how many dead people there are going to be, or when she gets to use the word 'pussy', but that's about the extent of her "bad-assery."
Is Robin even dead? Why is something like that a throwaway line?? As much as I love Harley Quinn, there comes a time where you have to concede that your character likely won't beat one of Batman's little gadget ninjas. So what even happened here??
The rest of the time she's a glorified princess in a castle waiting to be rescued. Bitch can't even swim to save herself but will play possum underwater to attack Batman - which I chose to put in the "Dis bitch stoopid" category instead of the "Excellent Execution of Evil Plan" bucket, for obvious reasons.
CHARACTER
I read that David Ayer told Margot Robbie that her character was basically a dick to people, always doing the worst things. Pick a pain point and dig at it, basically. I agree with this for maybe New52 Suicide Squad Harley, but not Classic Harley. The film tries to have her be both, really. I think the whole button pressing thing worked but a reason why classic Harley was so lovable was that she genuinely cared.
She wanted to help people, to figure out issues and why people did what they did. She wasn't doing it to be a dick. That alone made her stand out amongst the hundreds of Rogues that would stab you in the back without a second thought. Harley was so good at getting people to do what she wanted that a lot of her foes didn't realise it, and she rarely pressed the advantage. Still, the main issue the character had was that the movie didn't tell us anything about her that mattered. It would go on and on about what she was - but relied on prior comic/character knowledge and didn't SHOW us anything, it only told us in weird ways.
COMEDY
Well, she hardly has any. All of her lines were cringe as hell and they type of 'dad joke' style "crazy person hears voices" or "oops I didn't take my meds!" shit we've all heard before. The FUNNIEST things she did in the entire movie was when Enchantress told her it was safe to come out and she just gets up and starts to walk over to her and when Enchantress got serious in a fight, so Harley was like "welp, I give up!"
WEAPONS
Formerly using a pop-gun, mallet and a variety of gag weapons including pogo sticks and rubber chickens. Now using an OTT gimmick gun and a baseball bat. Even though we're shown guns don't have much effect on the goons... she never has a problem. We don't even know if she has the enhanced strength and agility her comic counterpart had once upon a time. There is no good reason why she was picked to be on this team to go and fight.
CREATION
Fans of Harley will probably debate whether the acid bath is a good creation story. I've never been a fan of this method. I mean, how many proteges and sidekicks are just watered down copies of their mentor's origin? Some are similar, like Dick Grayson also being an orphan - for example, all of Superman's random relatives thinking they are the last person from Krypton, all of the Spidermen/women being bitten, etc. But - using Dick Grayson as an example here - how he chooses to live his life is very different from Batman. The Joker is meant to be this one in a million mutation - like, it was an accident, shouldn't be replicated, he's unique.
Unique like having someone willingly throw their life away to join his circus when any person with a shred of sanity would be backing away in horror just thinking about it. The acid bath takes away any choice she had, even if she jumped willingly. I also vehemently disagree with the notion that Joker would accept or even encourage any kind of copy-cats, or that we have a definitive Joker origin story.
Plus Suicide Squad uses that old movie trope where electric shock therapy makes you crazy, and that ticks me off.
RELATIONSHIPS
Joker - extremely different to previous iterations. Here, Joker appears to love her and/or is possessive of her. When she's with him, she talks like a retarded two year old.
With Deadshot she seems to be close and flirty straight away even though there's no character moments that really make you think "Oh, these two work great together!" It's just here's two actors that are slightly more famous than the rest and have worked together before, shove 'em in together and give them both two intros!
Rest of the Squad - well, there's little to no interaction or any reason why they would bond. So, nothing.
WORK ETHIC
Well... she has none. At least cartoon Harley tried to fix the Joker. This one just gets him toy cats and machine guns because she's thick in the head.
PHYSICAL
We see her doing aerial stunts in her extremely roomy cell with gross bedding material. She jumps to catch a rope dangling from a helicopter. She survives like twenty helicopter crashes and one rather daunting fall onto a building. People make a huge deal about her running up the side of an elevator when it would have been nicer to skip that whole scene and add some plot instead.
Apart from that, physical I don't really have a problem with. Well, apart from little to none of it made sense (like the fall onto the building) and it seemed like most of it was just there to maximise the actress' screen time or the amount of time spent on her weirdly prepubescent-ish body.
THE ACTRESS
When a lot of the reviews came out for this movie - a common phrase was "it's a bad movie, but Margot Robbie, Will Smith and Viola Davis do their best to save it." Seriously, tell me you haven't read or heard that before.
Now, when the trailers came out for this movie, I unintentionally got hyped. As I got more news about it, my hopes started dwindling and I had a feeling I would have several issues with the movie. More than DC films as a whole. Still, I did do my absolute best to try to watch the movie objectively and to try to enjoy it.
The best part of the movie for me was the end credits - they were well designed - the original soundtrack - as in, not the tunes they crammed in there heavy handedly, but the other songs like Purple Lamborghini (the instrumental version anyway, can't stand the one where they try to speak English) Heathens and Sucker for Pain.. all were absolute earworms I could NOT get out of my head and honestly shoujld have been used in the actual movie instead of the Ipod mix we got. The other thing was that Captain Boomerang was clearly the best character - but he was so underused. I mean, I was looking forward to the snarky banter Boomer normally has with Deadshot.. but there was NONE of that. All scrapped so Deadshot had more screentime with Harley, some shoddy backstory about his kid and so Will Smith could do his tough guy thing.
Yeah, you know. Asking others if they're threatening him, telling people to "do something" while invading their personal space, playing with guns needlessly, getting physical with guards for no reason.. he's the GUN GUY NOT FISTICUFFS MAN. Then there was that weird bit where he plays all ghetto and street... then starts referencing some influential speaker/TED talker or something? Pick a lane! Plus all the times he was bitchy about women (Enchantress and his ex) and kinda racist ("if my kid can't get into a school with talent, pull some 'white people' shit").... yeah. #notmydeadshot
Viola Davis was fine, she did really well considering what she was given. Margot Robbie.. probably did the best she could with the schlock but.. nothing outstanding. And it's kind of insulting to say that these three actors did SO well, and TRIED SO HARD - when the others had screen time that's smaller than a decimal. I mean, this whole movie was Will Smith, Viola Davis, Margot Robbie and some vague background characters that maybe have one line each but nothing important in case they steal the spotlight away from the stars we're paying big bucks for!
I've never seen great potential with Margot before. Nothing that would make me say "Gee whiz! Move over Tom Hanks/Leonardo Di Caprio/Jim Carrey/Robert Downey Jnr! Get out of the way, Julia Roberts/Jennifer Lawrence/Meryl Streep/Goldie Hawn! Here's an actress just brimming with talent ready to replace you and win all the awards!"
I would say she's average, but extremely over-hyped because people think she's hot. Personally, I can't see it. There's nothing that just jumps out about her - she is just another Hollywood blonde who got famous because she took her underpants off in a movie.
Which leads us to now, I guess, where Margot looks set to keep coming back as Harley, even in movies she doesn't belong in or deserve to be in and all despite the fact that we the audience have not actually MET her character. Other franchises languish in development hell or fail to get sequels greenlit but not this time. She just gets to be in everything, (and produces it too, hmmmmm) no matter the context or if her character even has a point or reason to be there. BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE LIKE TO COSPLAY AS HER AND THINK THE ACTRESS IS HOT.
Someone was talking about the new Joker movie trailer and how they hoped Margot would be in it. I made a face, and they said they couldn't have a Joker movie that didn't include Harley Quinn. I disagree with this - I didn't say this but the Joker has been around for so long that it is very possible to have a Joker origin story that does not include Harley Quinn. The opposite cannot be true because the Joker is an integral component of how we GET a Harley Quinn in existence. While Harley Quinn has BECOME an important part of Joker's story since her own inception - she is not part of Joker's origin.
The other person said that Margot is awesome - and here I vocally disagreed. I said that she's not a good version of Harley Quinn seeing as how her portrayal is mostly centred around her butt - or lack thereof. Later on when discussing this discussion - another person (who knows me better) said that maybe I just didn't like Margot because I prefer classic Harley Quinn. I told him that Margot has basically taken a steaming dump on one of my favourite comic characters and is over rated.
Obviously I didn't get time to go into the nitty gritty details of my reasonings but I wanted to make a sort of essay about WHY I don't believe Margot was a good choice for Harley. If my colleagues never see it, that's fine. They're missing out but it'll help me anyway.
Now, regardless of how I feel about her actress - I think we can all agree that the Suicide Squad movie let her and the other characters down.
APPEARANCE
Previous incarnations of Harley had her in her classic jumpsuit, the one she chose when she decided to run away with the Joker. More recent iterations had her in corsets, leathers, bikinis, roller derby outfits.. you name it. Whatever she wore, it was mostly practical and for a large part - somewhat jester themed. The Suicide Squad movie chose to put Harley in ridiculous heels, short shorts that were basically sequined underpants, weird punkish/gang-like jewellery that would have no benefit and absolute risk during combat, a t-shirt that had seen better days about a hundred years ago and a jacket custom made to say that she's property. Oh, and she also did her make-up in the dark with colours that didn't make sense.
Harley has been seen before with tattoos that make sense - playing cards, diamonds, Joker's face etc. Here... she just has some grotty, hepatitis riddled prison tattoos that aren't even spelt right. One even repeats what her shirt says - in case we didn't realise that someone owns her. She has a couple of diamonds on one wrist, but they seem out of place with her current outfit. If you never knew that she used to wear diamonds on her outfit, you might wonder why she has them in the movie. Helpfully, she put 'rotten' on her jawline to assist her dentist.
She spends a lot of time in the movie being the token sex object. Now, there's nothing wrong with sexy. Sexy is fine. For example, Megan Fox in Transformers. She's hot and the audience often sees her in the male gaze - courtesy of the male protagonist - but she also holds her own against people who only see her as a sex object, we learn she's smart and has a background in cars/mechanics plus she actively contributes to the fight. At first glance you would think she is the prize for the hero to win but once you look beneath the surface you realise she is her own character and has feelings/drama/history etc.
However, Harley does not own her sexuality here, she IS owned. We see it in how she dresses, how she dances, how she's given away, how she cracks onto the guard we're supposed to see is actually terribly cruel to her, and she's the only Squad member we see in a state of undress, or bending over gratuitously. She's supposed to be smart, we never see it. She's just the T&A token female.
INFORMATION
Here's where I want to delve into what we KNOW about Harley Quinn - based off the Suicide Squad movie. Or... that is... what we're TOLD about her. Right off the bat - Waller tells us how much more fearless she is than the Joker. Crazier. Tells us that if anyone disrespected her that Joker would make them pay. Now this.. these few simple lines.. completely takes what DC has built up around the Joker for so, so many years and tosses it into the bin.
To this day, I have no idea why anyone working on this movie thought "Hey, we have the Joker in here! The infamous psychotic, Batman's greatest adversary, that guy who single-handedly killed or crippled most of the Bat-gang, the one guy other villains are scared of. You know what we should totally do? Make him a love sick puppy and his girlfriend can be the big bad! She can even help kill Robin!"
Movie Harley Quinn NEVER lives up to this hype. Oh, we're told she put several guards in the hospital (we never see this) we do see her small, shaking and being force-fed in prison. We do see her steal a handbag from an abandoned store during her wild, untamed rampage through Midway City. She headbutts and licks her cell for some reason. She skips out of duty for a drink at a bar where she serves the others. We see her following others around, seemingly having no designs on anything herself. She's used as a show for others. She's given like a gift. She takes out a few goons but nothing more than what her team mates have done. She also falls to pieces the moment she thinks her beau is dead.. but never once went to check if he was. She nearly creams her pants talking about how many dead people there are going to be, or when she gets to use the word 'pussy', but that's about the extent of her "bad-assery."
Is Robin even dead? Why is something like that a throwaway line?? As much as I love Harley Quinn, there comes a time where you have to concede that your character likely won't beat one of Batman's little gadget ninjas. So what even happened here??
The rest of the time she's a glorified princess in a castle waiting to be rescued. Bitch can't even swim to save herself but will play possum underwater to attack Batman - which I chose to put in the "Dis bitch stoopid" category instead of the "Excellent Execution of Evil Plan" bucket, for obvious reasons.
CHARACTER
I read that David Ayer told Margot Robbie that her character was basically a dick to people, always doing the worst things. Pick a pain point and dig at it, basically. I agree with this for maybe New52 Suicide Squad Harley, but not Classic Harley. The film tries to have her be both, really. I think the whole button pressing thing worked but a reason why classic Harley was so lovable was that she genuinely cared.
She wanted to help people, to figure out issues and why people did what they did. She wasn't doing it to be a dick. That alone made her stand out amongst the hundreds of Rogues that would stab you in the back without a second thought. Harley was so good at getting people to do what she wanted that a lot of her foes didn't realise it, and she rarely pressed the advantage. Still, the main issue the character had was that the movie didn't tell us anything about her that mattered. It would go on and on about what she was - but relied on prior comic/character knowledge and didn't SHOW us anything, it only told us in weird ways.
COMEDY
Well, she hardly has any. All of her lines were cringe as hell and they type of 'dad joke' style "crazy person hears voices" or "oops I didn't take my meds!" shit we've all heard before. The FUNNIEST things she did in the entire movie was when Enchantress told her it was safe to come out and she just gets up and starts to walk over to her and when Enchantress got serious in a fight, so Harley was like "welp, I give up!"
WEAPONS
Formerly using a pop-gun, mallet and a variety of gag weapons including pogo sticks and rubber chickens. Now using an OTT gimmick gun and a baseball bat. Even though we're shown guns don't have much effect on the goons... she never has a problem. We don't even know if she has the enhanced strength and agility her comic counterpart had once upon a time. There is no good reason why she was picked to be on this team to go and fight.
CREATION
Fans of Harley will probably debate whether the acid bath is a good creation story. I've never been a fan of this method. I mean, how many proteges and sidekicks are just watered down copies of their mentor's origin? Some are similar, like Dick Grayson also being an orphan - for example, all of Superman's random relatives thinking they are the last person from Krypton, all of the Spidermen/women being bitten, etc. But - using Dick Grayson as an example here - how he chooses to live his life is very different from Batman. The Joker is meant to be this one in a million mutation - like, it was an accident, shouldn't be replicated, he's unique.
Unique like having someone willingly throw their life away to join his circus when any person with a shred of sanity would be backing away in horror just thinking about it. The acid bath takes away any choice she had, even if she jumped willingly. I also vehemently disagree with the notion that Joker would accept or even encourage any kind of copy-cats, or that we have a definitive Joker origin story.
Plus Suicide Squad uses that old movie trope where electric shock therapy makes you crazy, and that ticks me off.
RELATIONSHIPS
Joker - extremely different to previous iterations. Here, Joker appears to love her and/or is possessive of her. When she's with him, she talks like a retarded two year old.
With Deadshot she seems to be close and flirty straight away even though there's no character moments that really make you think "Oh, these two work great together!" It's just here's two actors that are slightly more famous than the rest and have worked together before, shove 'em in together and give them both two intros!
Rest of the Squad - well, there's little to no interaction or any reason why they would bond. So, nothing.
WORK ETHIC
Well... she has none. At least cartoon Harley tried to fix the Joker. This one just gets him toy cats and machine guns because she's thick in the head.
PHYSICAL
We see her doing aerial stunts in her extremely roomy cell with gross bedding material. She jumps to catch a rope dangling from a helicopter. She survives like twenty helicopter crashes and one rather daunting fall onto a building. People make a huge deal about her running up the side of an elevator when it would have been nicer to skip that whole scene and add some plot instead.
Apart from that, physical I don't really have a problem with. Well, apart from little to none of it made sense (like the fall onto the building) and it seemed like most of it was just there to maximise the actress' screen time or the amount of time spent on her weirdly prepubescent-ish body.
THE ACTRESS
When a lot of the reviews came out for this movie - a common phrase was "it's a bad movie, but Margot Robbie, Will Smith and Viola Davis do their best to save it." Seriously, tell me you haven't read or heard that before.
Now, when the trailers came out for this movie, I unintentionally got hyped. As I got more news about it, my hopes started dwindling and I had a feeling I would have several issues with the movie. More than DC films as a whole. Still, I did do my absolute best to try to watch the movie objectively and to try to enjoy it.
The best part of the movie for me was the end credits - they were well designed - the original soundtrack - as in, not the tunes they crammed in there heavy handedly, but the other songs like Purple Lamborghini (the instrumental version anyway, can't stand the one where they try to speak English) Heathens and Sucker for Pain.. all were absolute earworms I could NOT get out of my head and honestly shoujld have been used in the actual movie instead of the Ipod mix we got. The other thing was that Captain Boomerang was clearly the best character - but he was so underused. I mean, I was looking forward to the snarky banter Boomer normally has with Deadshot.. but there was NONE of that. All scrapped so Deadshot had more screentime with Harley, some shoddy backstory about his kid and so Will Smith could do his tough guy thing.
Yeah, you know. Asking others if they're threatening him, telling people to "do something" while invading their personal space, playing with guns needlessly, getting physical with guards for no reason.. he's the GUN GUY NOT FISTICUFFS MAN. Then there was that weird bit where he plays all ghetto and street... then starts referencing some influential speaker/TED talker or something? Pick a lane! Plus all the times he was bitchy about women (Enchantress and his ex) and kinda racist ("if my kid can't get into a school with talent, pull some 'white people' shit").... yeah. #notmydeadshot
Viola Davis was fine, she did really well considering what she was given. Margot Robbie.. probably did the best she could with the schlock but.. nothing outstanding. And it's kind of insulting to say that these three actors did SO well, and TRIED SO HARD - when the others had screen time that's smaller than a decimal. I mean, this whole movie was Will Smith, Viola Davis, Margot Robbie and some vague background characters that maybe have one line each but nothing important in case they steal the spotlight away from the stars we're paying big bucks for!
I've never seen great potential with Margot before. Nothing that would make me say "Gee whiz! Move over Tom Hanks/Leonardo Di Caprio/Jim Carrey/Robert Downey Jnr! Get out of the way, Julia Roberts/Jennifer Lawrence/Meryl Streep/Goldie Hawn! Here's an actress just brimming with talent ready to replace you and win all the awards!"
I would say she's average, but extremely over-hyped because people think she's hot. Personally, I can't see it. There's nothing that just jumps out about her - she is just another Hollywood blonde who got famous because she took her underpants off in a movie.
Which leads us to now, I guess, where Margot looks set to keep coming back as Harley, even in movies she doesn't belong in or deserve to be in and all despite the fact that we the audience have not actually MET her character. Other franchises languish in development hell or fail to get sequels greenlit but not this time. She just gets to be in everything, (and produces it too, hmmmmm) no matter the context or if her character even has a point or reason to be there. BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE LIKE TO COSPLAY AS HER AND THINK THE ACTRESS IS HOT.
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