#like why is misogyny ALWAYS gotta bring up people going ‘well women enforce misogyny too’ they’re not the primary enforcers of it.

[thewingedwolf]

me trying to talk about the structural reasons why the tyrell girls are treated like shit and why cersei doesn’t see the walk of atonement coming

someone leaving the most annoying comment i’ve ever seen that’s now going to be the most popular version of this post bc they’re a bnf:

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Roman Sionis

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

Birds of Prey is a fun, silly movie. So you’d expect a fun, silly villain for such a film, right? Well, we sort of get that… but this is an R-rated fun, silly movie, so the villain is going to cuss a lot and peel people’s faces off and be a raging psychopathic manchild. Roman Sionis, everybody!

Good old Roman Sionis, known to comic fans as Black Mask (he isn’t ever called that by anyone except Harley during his introduction, and he doesn’t even wear his mask until the end), is just an absolute raging lunatic. He gets mad at the drop of a hat, is creepily posessive of Dinah Lance, has a very close relationship with his murderous second-in-command Zsasz, and is just generally unpleasant to every single person who crosses his path.

But that’s par for the course for Roman Sionis, who is never really EVER portrayed as a charming, likable guy. The real question here is, is he an entertaining villain? Well he’s played by Ewan McGregor, what do YOU think?

Motivation/Goals: Roman is a relatively simple villain, but I think this works in his favor. You see, a big issue with Harley’s previous outing, Suicide Squad, is that the mission was way too high stakes despite the cast featuring a group of people who didn’t really have any powers beyond “fighting really good.” or “has weapon skills.” You’re telling me you’re gonna put Harley Quinn, Deadshot, and Captain Boomerang up against Enchantress and her army of ancient Aztec super-zombies? WHAT? Here, we have a street-level threat much more suited to Harley’s capabilities: Roman is just a very powerful gangster, and his goal in this movie is the simple “get this diamond that was stolen back to me so I can make fat stacks of cash.” That’s really all their needs to be here, a simple MacGuffin to drive along the plot to its various setpieces.

Performance: I love Ewan McGregor, so, really, he didn’t have to do much with the role of Roman Sionis to make him great. Still, this man went above and beyond despite having comparatively little screentime to Harley. Roman seems incapable of going a single sentence without cursing up a storm and is the epitome of a psychopathic manchild, tormenting people for the slightest of reasons. He forces a woman to strip and dance on one of his tables because she was laughing too loud when he was upset, and decides not to spare a girl’s life because she had a gross snot bubble on her face from sobbing while he had his crony Zsasz peel off her parents’ faces. As funny and hammy as he gets, the dude is a stone-cold ruthless bastard who has no line he won’t cross to get what he wants.

Final Fate: Cass hides a grenade on him and steals the ring, and then Harley kicks him off the pier while he panics. Before he even hits the water, BOOM! Never would I have expected to laugh out loud at the sight of Ewan McGregor being blown into bits, but this movie was just full of surprises.

Best Scene: I think that the honor has to go to his establishing character moment with Zsasz, as they cut off the faces of a family who crossed Roman, and then when Roman decides to spare the daughter, he notices snot on her face, says “Ew” like a petulant child, and has Zsasz cut her face off anyway. It’s a great way to establish that Roman is an awful human being no matter how you slice it, and firmly establishes that while, yes, he is a misogynist villain in a female-led blockbuster, his misogyny is just a tiny facet of how unabashedly terrible Roman is.

Final Thoughts & Score: So, this is gonna sound weird, but… Roman kinda reminded me of Justin Hammer. Hammer is a villain who I have greatly warmed to over time (mostly thanks to Nando V Movies on YouTube), to the point where I think he’s actually pretty funny but is held back from true greatness by the sloppy nature of Iron Man 2. The film was big, bloated, and didn’t know what to do with itself. And this film is KIND OF like that… but it knows what to do with Roman.

The movie has an undercurrent of female empowerment, so why not make the villain emblematic of things women have to overcome? Roman is creepy, misogynistic, and even a bit racist especially with his condescending actions towards Dinah. And he even throws a fit when she “betrays” him and decides to murder her. But the movie is smart so as to not make this hamfisted; the movie makes it entirely clear that even if you take away his misogynistic elements, Roman Sionis is just an utterly disgusting human being. Everything about him is just so hilariously vulgar and repulsive, but the way he’s performed helps lighten it and help keep him within the tone of the movie. He’s just dark enough and just hammy enough to work.

My big issues with Roman are mostly due to his utilization and the wasted potential, which is a problem that really hits a lot of stuff in Birds of Prey. He is great every time he’s onscreen, but his screentime is fairly limited, and then he dies at the end which robs him of any chance of coming back in the future as an antagonist. He actually functions great as a more grounded threat rather than some larger-than-life end of the world threat, but the fact he dies horribly – before even having his mask burned onto his face, even! - just kind of feels like a waste of a character. To be fair, Black Mask is not the best or most interesting Batman villain crime lord; we have the Penguin for that. But when you cast  someone like Ewan McGregor and he’s clearly having a blast, it’s hard not to feel at least slightly bitter when he gets hilariously gibbed at the end.

Still, I can’t let Justin Hammer’s sacrifice go in vain; he walked so Roman could run, and Roman ran so that perhaps someday Hammer could sprint. Roman gets a nice, fat 8/10, which he definitely earns with the heaping helpings of ham he brings to the table, though he is held back at least a little by the wasted potential of his character.

But hey, if you want to talk about wasted potential…

Psycho Analysis: Victor Zsasz

I really like Victor Zsasz in this film. I really do. The angle they went with, the implied homosexuality, the actor… it’s all good stuff that helps make a disturbing character like Zsasz easier to swallow. But he gets hit with wasted potential harder than even Roman does.

Motivation/Goals: He’s Roman’s right-hand man, so basically his motivation is to do whatever Roman wants him to do. However, there is a bit of an implied thing between his boss and him; Zsasz seems undeniably irritated with the attention he lavishes on Dinah, and is very hands-on and affectionate with his boss. A lot of his later actions in the film and his cruelty towards Dinah does seem to stem from some place of anger towards her for taking Roman’s attention away from him.

Performance: I have to say, Chris Messina does a stellar job at portraying Zsasz as creepy and obsessive, and certainly showcases the fanatical loyalty he has towards Roman, making him something of a dark mirror to Harley’s former relationship with the Joker. I also appreciate that, despite not going with Zsasz’s original psychotic serial killer angle, they still made him a bloodthirsty psycho with a sort of nihilistic edge to him. Frankly, this might be the best possible take on a live-action Zsasz without things getting intensely uncomfortable.

Final Fate: This is probably the worst element of Zsasz: his death. Right before the climax he gets shot out of the blue by Huntress and then Harley just repeatedly stabs him with the arrow. And I have to make it clear here – Zsasz barely got to do anything. He never really poses any sort of physical threats to the heroines, never gets into a fight, and is never mentioned again after his death despite being very close to Roman (to the point where the two may have been lovers).

Final Thoughts & Score: As far as henchmen go, Zsasz is pretty solid conceptually. He’s established early on as a psychopathic enforcer of Roman’s gang, he has an eerie air to him, and he has a lot of elements from the comics you rarely see on Zsasz in other media, such as being blonde. Messina does a fantastic job at making the character seem like a competent killer in the employ of Roman.

But the key word is “seem,” because Zsasz frankly never lives up to his hype. Despite being introduced peeling the faces off of a family, he is just never utilized to his fullest extent. He’s kind of just there in a lot of scenes, and while he isn’t unmemorable or anything he never really does anything that makes him into a worthwhile addition to the franchise. He’s honestly just a glorified mook with a few interesting gimmicks to help set him apart.

I’ve gotta give him a 6/10. While he’s definitely a step above average, he’s really not anything amazing, mostly because the movie refuses to allow him to reach his full potential. He doesn’t have any great quotes, his most memorable scene really serves more to establish Roman than anything, and he is dumped and quickly forgotten right before the climax. He would easily be a 7 or 8 if the story treated him with a little more weight or respect, but he just ends up underwhelming despite having so much going for him, and it’s frankly a bit depressing. It’s just a very sad state of affairs for the character, especially when he managed to be more intimidating in the Arkham games despite the fact that he posed even less of a physical threat than he does here.

Well, while we’re here, let’s go over THAT Zsasz briefly.

Portrayed in the games by Danny Jacobs (who you may know as Sacha Baron Cohen's stand in on The Penguins of Madagascar. Yes, Zsasz and King Julien had the same voice actor.), Zsasz is never really a major antagonist and is, in all honesty, a pretty weak fighter; you can always take him down in one punch. The thing with Zsasz in the games, though, is that it’s always tricky to get to him, because he usually has hostages of some kind. In Arkham Asylum, he appears twice, and you need to use stealth to take him out before he kills his hostages. In City, he gets a much longer sidequest where he requires you to pick up ringing telephones and then glide to another one across the city within a time limit. Once you’ve listened to all of his messages, Batman finds out where his lair is, sneaks through it, and whoops his ass.

I certainly can’t say he’s the best villain in either game he appears in, but he’s definitely scary. His messages and game over screens are really freaky and unnerving, and the Riddler even requires you to find some of Zsasz’s work as parts of riddles… and by “work” I am of course referring to corpses posed in life-like positions. There’s also the horrifying little tidbit that in City, Zsasz actually does kill one of his hostages and there’s nothing that can be done about it; if you switch to detective mode in his lair, you can see a corpse at the bottom of the water in the room.

I think how creepy and intense he is really helps make him stand out among the more colorful characters in those games like Joker, Clayface, and Riddler, so I think giving him a nice 8/10 for his appearances is well-earned. I feel like Birds of Prey could have learned a few lessons from this portrayal; if they wanted to make him more creepy than physically intimidating, that could have worked well and it would have made his anti-climactic defeat a bit more plausible. Instead, they kind of tried this middle ground where he’s creepy enough and intimidating enough physically that it just feels like a letdown when he’s offed.

Oh yeah, did you know he appeared in Batman Begins? He had a brief cameo and didn’t do anything significant and looked like this:

Pretty sure he’d get a low score if he wasn’t just a quick little reference.