Birds Of Prey Trailer Review: 7 Ups & 4 Downs
"I'm Harley Freaking Quinn."
It's finally a good time to be a DC movie fan again. After some... unpleasantness, it feels like the DCEU (or whatever it is these days, let's not pick at that too much) is in good shape with Aquaman and Wonder Woman both excelling, a Flashpoint movie still to come and James Gunn's The Suicide Squad too. Then there's Joker, which is an astonishing achievement and the rumblings of news on Matt Reeves' The Batman.
As if that wasn't enough, there's also the small matter of the Birds Of Prey movie. Sure, it has a bad title, but this was always going to be a doubly pleasing chance to see more of Harley Quinn and to see more of the DC universe's most famous female characters, plus another pretty iconic villain in the shape of Ewan McGregor's Black Mask.
After a brief It-themed teaser was shown with the release of It: Chapter 2, we've now got the first full teaser and it's time to see how the hype ie building. Here's the trailer...
Now let's look at what works and what somewhat doesn't. First, the positives...
Ups
7. It's Light On Spoilers
In this world of studios looking to make sure they put as many bums on cinema seats as possible, it's all too often that we see spoiler heavy trailers or ones designed by deception (see Suicide Squad for both).
We can be thankful, then, that this teaser is particularly light on actual story details. We get to see that Harley's struggling with reclaiming her identity after her "relationship" with Jared Leto's Joker is done with and that she has no desire to fall into a similar toxic dynamic with another creepy white man. Other than her meeting like-minded individuals with similar feelings, that's pretty much all the story detail we get.
Given the temptation to show way too much, it's refreshing at least.