Harley Quinn announces her breakup the only way Harley Quinn could: she wrecks the Ace Chemicals plant where she once pledged herself to the Joker. The Guardian has her stealing a gasoline tanker and jumping clear at the last moment, and the explosion says everything the character cannot say out loud. Once word gets out that she no longer has the Joker’s protection, every criminal in Gotham with a grudge starts hunting her. That is the engine of Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), Cathy Yan’s loud, candy-colored, hyperviolent spin-off of Suicide Squad, written by Christina Hodson. It is a breakup movie first and a team movie second. Empire calls it “a Marriage Story with punch-ups,” and the line sticks because it is accurate.

Harley narrates, so the story arrives in whatever order her cracked head prefers. Hodson fractures the plot, drip-feeding information and introducing the main players one by one, as Empire describes it. The Guardian traces the habits back to Kill Bill: the insistent voiceover, the shuffled chronology, the wackily choreographed punch-ups, the exotic villains announced in a freeze-frame with a surtitle. It even notes the derisive joke at the expense of one assailant’s resemblance to Frida Kahlo. Movie Elite found the timeline-hopping easy to follow, and I agree. The jumps never lose the thread because the thread is simple. A pickpocket named Cassandra Cain lifts a diamond from Victor Zsasz, swallows it after she is arrested, and Roman Sionis wants it back, since it holds the account numbers to the Bertinelli family fortune. Everything else is decoration, and the decoration is the pleasure.

Margot Robbie, who also produced and pitched the project to Warner Bros. in 2015, carries it with total conviction. Empire reports that at her behest the working title was “Fox Force Five,” a nod to the fake TV pilot in Pulp Fiction, and the film does share some of that rockabilly swagger. The Guardian reaches for “Lolita meets Cynthia Rothrock” and admires her capacity for pop-eyed grinning. Movie Elite admits Harley is not its favorite character, yet calls Robbie perfect and says it is hard not to smile at her one-liners. Her life after the Joker is a tour of bad decisions: a hyena named Bruce, after Wayne, roller derby, and a night of partying that Empire compares to a coked-up 1917 because it plays out in one long shot. It is silly. Under the silliness sits a woman with nobody left to perform for.

The supporting women are sharper than the premise suggests. Rosie Perez plays Renee Montoya as a detective belittled at work and hooked on the tropes of eighties cop shows. The Guardian spots Shane Black’s fingerprints in her, above all in the grimly ominous moment she is told to hand in her gun and badge, and it quotes Harley’s verdict: “No cop ever gets stuff done until after they’ve been suspended.” Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Helena Bertinelli, a mob heiress turned crossbow killer, gets some great lines, according to Movie Elite. Jurnee Smollett-Bell’s Dinah Lance sings in Sionis’s nightclub and can smash martini glasses with her voice, per Empire; Movie Elite finds her a decent Black Canary, though it prefers the Arrowverse version. Ella Jay Basco gives Cass the streetwise edge the plot needs, since the whole story turns on her. Chris Messina plays Zsasz, Sionis’s sadistic right hand, and Ali Wong has a smaller part as Ellen Yee.

Ewan McGregor is the divisive piece. Movie Elite wanted Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, a man whose presence terrifies a whole room, and got a flamboyant, darkly comic Black Mask instead: mean, willing to torture, never truly frightening. The Guardian adds that this Sionis is also a culturally insensitive collector of African art, a detail that makes him more pathetic than menacing. I side with the complaint. McGregor is enormously watchable, but the film asks us to fear a man it keeps inviting us to laugh at, and the danger to Cass never weighs as much as the hunt makes it sound.

The film is also, frankly, a mess in places. Empire’s words are “gaudy” and “muddled, mostly entertaining,” and it concedes that not everything works. It adds that it is great fun when the five women finally share the screen, which only underlines how long the structure makes us wait. Some viewers object to what Yan and Hodson do to the source material. A thread on r/DC_Cinematic calls the film gorgeous, well-acted and well-shot, then says it takes far too many liberties with the Birds and their world. That is a fair complaint from a comics reader and a minor one for everyone else.

What holds the chaos together is the idea in the title. One review notes that the emancipation belongs to Harley, but all five women get to blaze new trails on their own terms. Dinah turns down Montoya’s offer to inform because the GCPD was not there when her mother died. Harley, who has defined herself through the Joker, has to find out who she is without Mr J. The answers are not subtle, but they land because the cast is, as Movie Elite puts it, clearly having a ball.

Audiences were colder than critics. The film premiered in Mexico City on January 25, 2020, opened in the United States on February 7 in IMAX, Dolby Cinema, ScreenX and 4DX, earned generally positive reviews, and still grossed $205.5 million worldwide, short of a reported break-even of $250 to 300 million. Shot between January and April 2019 around Downtown Los Angeles, the Arts District and the Burbank soundstages, it looks like a film made with money and nerve in equal parts. For the studio that reads as a loss. For the viewer it is a gift: a kinetic, ridiculous action comedy with five women at the center and a script so dense with side gags that Movie Elite says it needs several viewings to catch them all. I plan on giving it a second.