Review: SUPERGIRL

 by Rob DiCristino

Girls get it done. Well, if they feel like it.

“He sees the good in everyone, but I see the truth,” Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) says about her cousin, Superman (David Corenswet). It’s true that the Man of Steel takes a considerably more generous view of humanity — of terrestrial and extraterrestrial beings alike, actually — than she does, but perhaps that’s because the famed Last Son of Krypton never really felt the loss of their home planet. Kara did. Well, sort of: In the years after Kal-El’s parents shot his toddling ass into the far reaches of space, Kara grew up on a Kryptonian colony designed by her father (David Krumholtz as Zor-El), where she lived in peace until a fatal strain of radiation poisoning laid waste to what remained of their population. Hoping to ensure his daughter a prosperous future — and perhaps hoping to undermine the whole “my son will rule the Earth as an uncompromising God” plan hatched by his brother — Zor-El sent his only child to a place where she could have an impact. Where she could find her path. Where, alongside Kal-El and Earth’s other metahumans, she could be a hero.

But again, Kara has elected a slightly different response to this particular call to adventure. While Big Blue busies himself defending truth, justice, and the American way, she and her trusty super dog, Krypto, treat the universe like one giant pub crawl (specifically those planets orbiting red suns, where her powers don’t activate and she can get a proper buzz on). It’s not that Kara is unfeeling — as I said, she favors places where she can actually feel things — it’s that she’s too resentful to lift a finger for anyone else. Despite Kal’s invitations back to Earth, she’s perfectly content riding the Hot Mess Express until a space pirate called Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) steals her ship and poisons her dog. As it turns out, this is the same Krem who recently murdered swordsmith Elias Knoll (Ferdinand Kingsley) and his family, leaving behind only pint-sized Ruthye (Eve Ridley) — for reasons that will become more inexplicable as the film goes on — to take revenge. So yeah, it’s True Grit in space, plus Jason Momoa as an immortal, motorbike-riding surf vampire called Lobo.

Adapted from Supergirl: The Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl is a considerably lighter and lower-stakes adventure than its almost fatally-overstuffed DC Universe predecessor, Superman. Australian newcomer Milly Alcock — who already made a splash in said predecessor and has been firming-up her badass bonafides on HBO’s House of the Dragon — is immediately captivating in the title role, carrying herself with a devil-may-care energy that never bleeds into haughty ignorance. Kara knows that the universe is made of hard-boiled ass fat. She knows scumbags like Krem and his band of child bride-kidnapping Brigands terrorize the innocent with impunity. She respects Ruthye’s whole Inigo Montoya bit, and she will definitely be thinking of her when she beats Krem senseless and steals Krypto’s antidote. But revenge, she says, is a fool’s errand. It doesn’t make anything better. Hurting those who hurt you doesn’t make your pain go away. It’s nothing more than a slippery slope towards self-medication and misery.

The trouble with Supergirl — which is otherwise lean, funny, and entertaining — is that we never understand the source of Kara’s antipathy. When did she exact revenge? On whom? Kryptonian plate tectonics? Why does she resist Kal’s optimism? Why don’t we develop their dynamic? Why wasn’t Zor-El a eugenicist like his brother? Why did Krem leave Kara on a poisonous, green-sunned planet if he knew that the sun was going to set? Oh, and why in the intergalactic fuck would a child trafficker let Ruthye escape if her whole family is dead? There’s no one to come after her! These may seem like irrelevant, Cinema Sins quibbles, but after an electric opening act that blends Star Wars, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and Guardians of the Galaxy, Supergirl collapses into a maddening collection of movements that fail to develop — let alone resolve — any of the major character threads established early on. Ana Nogueira’s screenplay feels like it’s been chopped down to the bone, especially in a disastrous climactic action sequence that reeks of reshoots and rearrangements.

What’s worse is that, at 108 minutes soaking wet, Supergirl is endearing enough to have earned an extra few minutes for character and theme. Perhaps James Gunn overreacted to complaints about his Superman’s clunky storytelling and crowded roster — by the way, I hope none of you are Krypto fans, because that little guy spends 95% of this movie unconscious — and had Craig Gillespie remove everything that seemed like extraneous filler? Brevity is certainly a virtue in these blockbusters, but they forgot to replace the bloat with, you know, interesting things that make the movie coherent and exciting! Ruthye has zero emotional latitude, Lobo is a complete afterthought — which is especially upsetting because Momoa iterates on his Beer-Chugging Gym Bro just differently enough to be worthwhile — and what passes for Kara’s emotional catharsis feels completely unearned. So while Supergirl succeeds in adding another dynamic character to Gunn’s universe, it — and see if you can find the irony here — utterly fails to give us a reason to care about her.

Supergirl hits U.S. theaters on Friday, June 26th.