#BirdsOfPrey deals with a lot of the same tropes you get in "grim and gritty" superhero movies but it doesn't it in another way... glam and glittery.
It's not grimdark, it's glamspark.
It's not grimdark, it's glamspark.
I also love the street-level view of Gotham's villain/crime politics in #BirdsOfPrey, something that the some of the best Batman stories in the cartoons and comics have done, but which has never been done justice on the big screen.
It's not about saving the world or preventing a war. Even the fight for who controls Gotham's underworld is local. Ultimately while every protagonist has her own stakes, the thing that unites them the most is saving one specific child who isn't destined or chosen or whatever.
I would honestly love to see Cathy Yan take on Superman. Man of Steel had him "save the world" without any focus on saving people, and missed the heart of the character. He was there to beat the bad guys, to win fights, not to help people and save lives.
Yan brought together four characters who were all motivated by very specific, very different things and brought them to the team-up moment in a way that didn't lose sight of who they were and why they were there.
It is possibly the least "because the script says so" of any superhero movie I can think of. The bad decisions are believable. Each character who walks into a scene has a reason to be there, a path that brought them there.
"Better to light a beard on fire than curse the darkness."
