Batman and Harley Quinn (2017)

Sam Liu's Batman and Harley Quinn arrives as a strange red-headed nephew of the animated series that spawned it, a 48 Hrs.-style caper in which the Dark Knight and Nightwing reluctantly drag a paroled Harleen Quinzel into a plot involving Poison Ivy, the Floronic Man, and a virus that would turn the whole population into plant hybrids. The tone lurches between slapstick and softcore, a combination the filmmakers seem to regard as adult. It is not adult. It is a teenager with a fake ID.

On the ledger of social consciousness, the film registers faintly and inconsistently. The environmental angle exists, but it belongs to the villains, who mutter about humanity's damage to the planet and promise everyone a vested interest in going green. This is the old eco-terrorist trope, not a climate sermon, and the film never asks us to take it seriously. Harley's stint at a themed restaurant, dressed as a costumed waitress for minimum wage while her criminal record blocks a return to psychiatry, gestures at something like economic grievance, though it is played for laughs. The camera's treatment of her, all those leering upskirt shots, does more to undermine any feminist reading than a hundred girl-power lines could repair. The voice cast is largely white, with Kevin Michael Richardson as the notable exception.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. No LGBTQ themes. No racial commentary. No body positivity, which the camera actively refutes. No neurodivergence, despite a protagonist with a psychiatry degree. No history to revise. And no lecturing worth the name, because the film is too busy high-fiving itself to preach. A curious artifact: progressive in nothing, offensive in several things, and oddly sincere about none of them.