Say this: 'Birds of Prey' flies fast

Margot Robbie portrays Harley Quinn in a kick-ass display of ... well ... kickass.

Gotham used to be denominated by Batman and his implacable foes, fiends such as The Joker, The Penguin and The Riddler. If you go to the movies, you know that times have changed.

Joker, to cite one example, has become a full-fledged mental case, the living embodiment of urban loneliness and crushed dreams. Joaquin Phoenix, who's about to win an Oscar for his unnerving portrayal, took the Joker out of the comic-book realm and created a figure as disturbing as the one Michael Rooker created in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Now comes Birds of Prey, which tries to put Gotham back in a comic-book box, turning the movie over to Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), a character who made her big-screen debut in the woeful Suicide Squad. Director Cathy Yan and screenwriter Christina Hudson give Robbie a platform on which to display her version of crazy. Call it a mixture of girl-power and rage.

The set-up: Having just broken up with the Joker, Harley’s emotional pigtails are drooping. She’s also very angry and when Harley gets angry, explosions likely will follow. So will fights in which Harley will display her phenomenal skills. Her brutal capacities play against her little-girl looks. Make that deranged little girl looks.

Fast-moving and devoted to the idea that action can’t be too excessive, Robbie and her cohorts seldom slow the movie’s roll as it romps across Gotham, a city that has given Harley an accent that’s pure New York.

Say, this: No one will accuse Robbie of not having a good time as she fights the movie's principal villain, Ewan McGregoe’s Roman Sionis, a.k.a. Black Mask. As is appropriate for the genre, McGregor does some scenery-chewing -- with relish, of course.

As the movie develops, Harley encounters several women who have the potential to becoming sidekicks. These include a Gotham detective (Rosie Perez), a singer (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) who plies her trade at Roman's night club and goes by the name of Black Canary. A revenge-seeking woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has made the crossbow her weapon of choice. She's The Huntress. Harley also meets a teen-age thief (Ella Jay Basco), an expert pickpocket who’s able to keep pace with Harley in the profanity department.

Not all of the action can be classified as comic-book harmless. Early on, Harley jumps from a stage onto the legs of a seated man. Bones break. Roman's henchman (an effective Chris Messina) inflicts punishment on his boss's enemies by peeling the skin off their faces.

To her credit, Yan gives each of the women personality and independence. Although Robbie produced the movie, she doesn’t hog it. The basic formula finds women overcoming differences to fight a common enemy.

Yan plays with the movie’s structure, manipulating time to allow for the introduction of backstories but generally keeps pedal to the metal. After a while, the glut of action loses some of its excitement and the movie never pretends to explore any thematic depths.

No, the point here is ass-kicking sisterhood with comic flourishes that land with varying degrees of success. Still, it’s not easy to dismiss a movie in which Haley acquires a pet hyena and names the animal Bruce. A reference to the Gotham of tradition as in, say, Bruce Wayne?

Birds of Prey arrives with a subtitle that can’t be said without taking a breath: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. You get the idea. Freed from the Joker's influence, a liberated Harley emerges. But what's with the word "emancipation?" Did Joker free her? If so is that really liberation?

But wait. I'm reading too much into a movie that isn't out to test anyone's interpretive powers.

Birds of Prey doesn't allow for much by way of reflection. At an economical 109-minutes in length, the movie plays a steady game of hurry-up, which may be a good thing because it doesn’t exactly have a lot on its mind. Part costume party, part girl-power explosion and part grunt-and-stunt festival, Birds of Prey passes in a blur.

A lesson in one-sided argument

Won't Back Down stacks the deck in favor of charter schools.

Want to know why your kid can't read?

The answer is simple: It's because teachers receive pensions, have job security and are represented by a union that doesn't give a damn about students.

That's the not-so-underlying message of Won't Back Down, a drama that attempts to applaud the efforts of two women -- a mom and a teacher -- to establish a charter school.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Jamie Fitzpatrick, a lower-class Pittsburgh single mother who's trying to get a better education for her dyslexic daughter (Emily Alyn Lind). When Jamie's efforts to work within the system -- attempting to switch classes -- hits a wall, she enlists the help of Nona Alberts (Viola Davis), a teacher whose son also is having learning problems. Nona's on the verge of being beaten down by a system that doesn't demand enough from either teachers or students.

It's not easy to make a balanced film about the process of starting a charter school, and it's quickly apparent that Won't Back Down isn't going to try. The movie's playing with a stacked deck. This one views school boards, educational bureaucracies and unions as impediments to attaining educational nirvana. And woe to the teacher who might give a moment's thought to salary or job security.

Most of the movie focuses on Jamie's persistence. She works two jobs (one as a bartender, the other selling used cars) and begins to devote all her spare time to turning Adams Elementary school into a charter. She also has a brief and mostly pointless flirtation with one of the school's better teachers (Oscar Isaac), a product of Teach for America.

Davis's Nona has struggles of her own. Her son Cody (Dante Brown) has been deemed a slow learner, and she and her husband (Lance Reddick) have hit a bad patch.

The rest of the cast includes Rosie Perez (as one of Nona's fellow teachers); Holly Hunter (as a union official); Ving Rhames (as principal of a charter school); and Bill Nunn (as the principal of Adams Elementary). Hunter portrays the only union-oriented character who expresses a modicum of doubt about her position.

Right from the start director Daniel Barnz , who co-wrote the script with Brin Hill, makes it clear where the movie's sentiments lie. He quickly introduces us to a teacher who seems to be more interested in texting than teaching. Will she give Jamie's daughter a little extra help? Not if it means staying after 3 p.m.

There's no faulting the main performances. Davis is incapable of giving a bad performance, and she's expectedly convincing as a teacher who wants to rekindle the spark that originally drew her to classrooms. Davis's ability to play life-sized characters serves her well here, and she's able to suggest some of Nona's conflict about turning against a few of her colleagues.

Gyllenhaal's performance as a determined woman has lots of spark, but her character has as little appreciation for nuance as the one-sided script.

For a drama about education, Won't Back Down spends too little time in the classroom. In one welcome scene, Nona fires up her class, but for the most part, the classroom becomes a backdrop for a drama that seems more interested in celebrating two strong women than in tackling complex educational issues.

Look, I have no idea about how to fix the nation's public schools, but I'm willing to bet that if all teachers' unions vanished tomorrow, American education wouldn't suddenly turn some magical corner.

Oh well, you can read about educational policy elsewhere. What I'll say here is that Won't Back Down makes an elementary mistake: It puts its reading of the issues ahead of any deeper exploration of character.