a review of 蝙蝠侠与哈莉·奎恩

A surprise, canonical continuation of Batman: TAS with an emphasis on cashing in on the mega-popularity of Harley Quinn. What's so disappointing about the movie isn't that it gives Joker's ex a weird romance with Nightwing (who is completely useless BTW), the fart joke, or even those stupid musical numbers like you'll most often hear complained about. It's that there's a good episode of the show hidden amongst it all that features a believable villain team up, makes a D-list foe like The Floronic Man a legitimate threat, and has a nice little eco-friendly message to it. It's just buried underneath all the Harley stuff. Batman and Harley Quinn amounts to a superhero road trip flick. One where the latter of two title characters regularly derails the plot with what are supposed to be amusing detours, but instead just end up coming off as aggravating filler content. There are some cutesy silly moments, almost all of which shockingly come from Batman, but for the most part this isn't a funny movie. The amount of sexual material is uncomfortable. Not only does it serve to demean it's female characters, but also almost crosses the line into animated porno-parody territory (which I would know nothing about!). The opening act finds Quinn working at a breastaurant where the animators wasted no time showing off their ability to draw skimpily dressed women and then quickly moves on to some awkward, innuendo-laden foreplay dialog where she hooks up with Grayson for no reason at all. All that's missing is the actual sex scene. It gets pretty sleazy. I got a kick out of watching Batman trying to keep his cold, calm demeanor in the face of constantly being annoyed by Harley. There's also a nice scene of tenderness between her and Ivy that reminded me why I've always enjoyed their pairing. These and Melissa Rauch's delivery are about all I really enjoyed in the movie. This feels like a forgotten episode of the TV series that Bruce Timm decided to pad out for a straight-to-DVD release. Unfortunately, all he could think of to do that was injecting Harley Quinn into the mix with some bad jokes and effectively ruining everything. There's such a promising story here that gets bogged down by the character's Deadpool-esque sense of humor that never allows for there to be a single serious moment. Mix that in with it's questionable treatment of women (did we really need a scene of Harley shaking her breasts at a bar full of drooling men?) and there's no reason to even acknowledge the film. Huge DCAU fan or not.