So the precinct assault/Fun Gun scene in Birds of Prey is one of my favorite action sequences of all time.
I loved the glitter shells we saw in the trailer, but it's another detail that seals it for me: the bean bag rounds.
I loved the glitter shells we saw in the trailer, but it's another detail that seals it for me: the bean bag rounds.
We get a loving close up of an actual bean bag like would be used in a carnival game being shot at high velocity.
If you don't get the significance: cops have in their arsenal a "less-lethal" "riot control" munition called a "bean bag round".
If you don't get the significance: cops have in their arsenal a "less-lethal" "riot control" munition called a "bean bag round".
If you watch the movie, Harley displays throughout it a distinct preference for melee weapons. I believe in the DCUO game, she's even the exemplar for big swingy fighting style.
But when she storms the precinct, she does it with a bandoleer full of distinctly non-lethal and wacky circus themed rounds, sending the stunned police stumbling and running and taking them out in painful, humiliating fashion.
Even though her weapons are pointedly cartoony, there's none of the cartoonishly over the top bone-breaking violence of most of her fights. She's calm and precise and deliberate.
Now, we could talk about pragmatic concerns, in-universe and out. On a meta level, someone involved may not have wanted to tempt a Thin Blue Backlash or might have thought that having Harley breaking bones and even ambiguously killing police would lose to much audience goodwill.
And in-story, Harley was trying to get out of the crosshairs, not get in them. Becoming a copkiller would have intensified the heat on her, and probably is the only thing that would have made The Bat care about her once she's severed from an at-large Joker.
But operating under the constraint that dealing the same level of violence to the cops that she routinely dishes out would be counter to her longterm goals, she still manages to humiliate them.
She attacks them not just with a gun, but with a parody of a gun. She satirizes their own "less-lethal" tactics to take them down alive.
She shoots one in the back as he runs away.
She shoots one in the back as he runs away.
In the one scene in the movie where she makes a firearm her first choice, she's storming into the cops' "home" with grenades, shooting them with "bean bags", and shooting them as they run away.
She defeats a squad of corrupt, craven Gotham police with a biting satire of their own tactics.
The Joker could never be that wickedly clever.
The Joker could never be that wickedly clever.
