What a bummer. I wasn’t overly hyped for Supergirl, but I was cautiously optimistic, especially with how James Gunn restarted Superman, hoping lightning could strike twice. Instead, we get what the superhero genre has been giving audiences since the pandemic: empty promises. Two steps forward, but one step back I guess. Sorry to the girls out there hoping Kara Zor-El would get the same attention as her more popular cousin: alas, it is not to be.
Not that this Kara (Milly Alcock) would care. It’s her 23rd birthday, which starts with a planet hopping bar crawl across the universe, despite her cousin Clark’s (David Corenswet) hopes she’d stay on Earth with Krypto. Kara’s booze filled haze coincides with something not as fun. Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), leader of the Brigands, kills poor Ruthye Marye Knoll’s (Eve Ridley) parents, sending the angry girl on a mission for revenge. Kara wouldn’t give a flying f about this…except in his escape Krem injures Krypto, not an ideal choice to piss off a dog owner that is also a super powered god on a yellow sun planet.
I like Craig Gillespie, but I would say he picks smart scripts more than he makes scripts better. Supergirl’s script is generic stuff countless movies have done already, with nothing new to say. The only character trait Krem has as far as I can tell is he likes to eat: poor Matthias Schoenaerts is hidden behind hellraisery makeup and can’t really do much else since he’s downing something. Eve Ridley comes off across more as the annoying kid in a movie who constantly refuses to listen to orders and finds themselves in trouble over and over again because of it, pissing you off in the process. We don’t spend enough time with her family for their murders to mean anything lasting, so poor Eve is trying to manufacture emotional catharsis out of nothing, and it doesn’t really work. The yellow sun rising macguffin is used so repeatedly I just rolled my eyes when another one got Kara out of her jam. Even can’t miss emotional stakes like child abduction or losing parents fall flat in how Gillespie executes them in Supergirl. And yet, all this would be forgiven if the fight sequences were exciting at all. But like Superman, Kara keeps getting manufactured in and out of sequences that make her powerful or not. It’s lazy plotting that sucks any joy out of the fights, which use even lazier CGI and laziest Snyder cutting from fast to slow back to fast again to make it look cool when it isnt.
The saving grace is I think Supergirl is cast correctly. Milly Alcock has the look and the wit to make Supergirl work in a better movie. It’s hard to look great acting against dry wall like she has to here, but because of that bar, she stands out, mostly in good ways. There’s an eff you energy hiding deep personal ghosts she carries, which is going to work like gangbusters when Supergirl and Superman are in a movie together, as Clark tries and fails to understand Kara’s cynicism and wisecracks. Try as she might, Alcock can’t save Supergirl from being mediocre. But she does sorta save it from full on fiasco, so I guess that’s something?
Hopefully this proves road bump over road block for DC’s movies. But at this point, I’m more Kara than Clark on films like these. Let’s go on that bar crawl instead? To the red sun planet of course: I wanna feel the burn of that whiskey flight peatily going down my jugular. Woo girls for the win!