‘Supergirl’ wastes its incredible talent

A messy, inebriated Girl of Steel is a catchy concept that departs from the character’s upbeat onscreen image. Supergirl pulls from inspired corners of the comics while spinning out of James Gunn’s recent, good-natured Superman , yielding an edgier relaunch set across intergalactic truck stops (à la Gunn and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy ). However, while the film from I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie is chock-a-block with fun ideas, it never makes them sing. The result is a scattered semi-origin story that never quite coheres—aesthetically or dramatically—proving once again that Hollywood’s superhero well is in dire need of replenishing.

One thing the film gets right is its protagonist, played by House of the Dragon’s Milly Alcock as a directionless 20-something who prefers whiskey to truth, justice, and the American way. Most major incarnations of Supergirl/Kara Zor-El have just been gender-bent versions of their male counterparts, from Helen Slater’s optimistic outsider in the days of Christopher Reeve, to Melissa Benoist’s bumbling reporter in the character’s self-titled CW series, to the angstier big-screen version seen in The Flash, in which Sasha Calle replaced a scowling Henry Cavill. However, in pulling from the 2021 comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely—an interplanetary revenge saga—Gillespie’s Supergirl immediately separates its lead character from her kindly cousin, played by David Corenswet.

Rather than a girl scout, she’s a party girl in search of purpose, with a Valley-specific vocal fry and a penchant for waking up hungover and alone. Her only friend is her loyal canine Krypto, so when the feisty pup is shot with an arrow tipped with slow-acting poison, she’s forced to embark on a lengthy fetch-quest for the antidote, alongside an eager young girl on a revenge mission of her own—against the very same perpetrators, who happened to kill her family. These are the movie’s broad strokes, but it seldom lives up to its promise of a True Grit-style reflective road trip in which the characters imprint upon each other and learn more about themselves. Supergirl’s new ward, the sword-wielding adolescent Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley)—who, thanks to an oft-incomprehensible dialogue mix, keeps introducing herself as Ruthye [Mumble Mumble]—is hellbent on revenge, but Supergirl insists this end-goal will do no good.

However, Supergirl’s objection to Ruthye’s mission ends up a half-hearted attempt to imbue the movie with soul. As the plot trudges from one rundown alien locale to the next—and the villainous bandits, led by Matthias Schoenaerts’ leather-clad, piercing-laden Krem veer in and out of the heroes’ orbits through repeated happenstance—the question of vengeance remains a linear, unmoving problem. Supergirl’s rigid morality, in this regard, is merely expressed through dialogue, and finds neither an opportunity to manifest dramatically, nor a point of origin in the movie’s many flashbacks to Supergirl’s life on Krypton, the doomed planet from which she and Superman once escaped. That she insists Ruthye avoid the path of bloodshed feels less like an emotional core and more of a plot convenience meant to spin the drama’s wheels, since it’s barely something Ruthye reckons with either. Ridley, the young British actress of part Filipino origin, does what she can with the role, but ends up limited by the story’s unwillingness to let emotions ever dictate the action. There’s talk, talk and more talk about the emotions underlying revenge, but never an actual confrontation of them.

In that same vein, the harmful consequences of Supergirl’s inactions—her refusal to let a destructive villain be put down for good—have vicious ripple effects that neither she nor the movie at large seem to acknowledge. So, when it finally comes time for her to take a climactic stand, how this actually differs from her previous decisions (if at all) is left to the imagination; is there a meaningful difference between Ruthye killing the bad guy, or someone else doing it in her stead? What would this actually do to the young girl’s psyche? It’s surprisingly hard to say, despite this being a frequent topic of discussion. Supergirl is a tale of morality in which there are no real moral conundrums, even when a more gleefully violent character enters the fray: the hulking mercenary Lobo (Jason Momoa). A fan favorite, he’s just kind of around, hovering in the background, waiting to ride his flying motorcycle and kick off a bit of action before disappearing again. His incidental presence adds little, when his trigger-happy nature ought to be a mirror to Supergirl’s apparent pacifist streak, with Ruthye theoretically caught in the middle. But if this thematic triptych was ever an idea on behalf of screenwriter Ana Nogueira, it’s one that never comes to the fore in the final film.

The pieces are all there, and they’re ready to be assembled into something worthwhile, but beyond the fleeting emotions of Supergirl’s flashbacks—childhood scenes which emphasize her isolation, but never the importance of Krypto as her only friend and the only connection to her past—the result is too haphazard to leave a lasting impression. The same can be said for the action too, and not just the moments of actual fisticuffs. Supergirl is a film in which the very act of motion feels stifled, by editing and framing that obscure both momentum and the basic clarity of what objects and people are colliding in the first place, starting with the inciting incident that leads to Ruthye’s family being murdered (it appears to stem from an accident, but it’s hard to tell). Cinematographer Rob Hardy attempts to drench the film in shadow, yielding some eye-catching contrast in moments of stillness, but in the process, movement and motivation that feel completely hidden from view.

Your mileage may vary on the film’s barrage of obvious jokes—Supergirl suffers from the Tony Stark problem of pop culture references meant only for the audience, which feel strange when deployed as banter against aliens from other planets—but at the very least, the movie’s aforementioned flashbacks create a rock-solid emotional core, even though this ends up paid off in awkward ways. Through snippets of Supergirl’s backstory sprinkled across the runtime, we learn of the broken piece of Krypton on which she was initially raised by her benevolent mother Alura (Emily Beecham) and her tenacious father Zor-El (David Krumholtz), who are forced to send her to Earth when radiation makes survival untenable, cutting her off from the only people and culture she knew.

Krumholtz, in fact, delivers the film’s most powerful performance despite speaking entirely in the made-up Kryptonian language. His tone and gesticulations betray both a desperation and a deep, abiding love that translates across linguistic barriers. But this deployment of alien language is important too. These flashbacks are the only time we hear Kryptonian spoken, among the film’s litany of fictional dialects. It exists only in Kara’s memory; when she arrives on Earth as a teenager, even Superman doesn’t speak it. However, while these flashbacks weave a delicate emotional fabric akin to an immigrant story, they’re rarely paid off in the movie’s present, and pretty much never inform the ongoing plot. They may as well belong to a completely different movie.

The film’s vague idea of “goodness,” as imparted to Supergirl, by her parents and her cousin, is neither something meaningfully expressed, nor something with which the character ever wrestles, even as she finally dons her iconic “S” and makes a godlike, sun-lit arrival for the umpteenth time (the movie’s flashback structure ends up resembling the randomness of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel). These are images and moments of dramatic crescendo that could have been loaded with meaning and importance, but they instead play like pre-visualized sequences strung together with the bare-minimum semblance of story context, like a blockbuster written and rendered in reverse, with only the briefest gestures towards what it means to live with loss and pain. Alcock’s arrival is a fun one, and she’ll likely have worthwhile adventures in the future. But as her first outing in the DCU, Supergirl is too dull to make an impact.