Last year, Superman managed to drag DC’s top hero back into relevance after years of wandering in the dark. It wasn’t great, but it had some life. It at least understood that Superman should feel like a hero, even if the script kept undercutting him in ways that didn’t make much sense.
Now comes Supergirl, and whatever goodwill Superman scraped together doesn’t last long. This thing falls apart fast. It’s a step down in almost every way, and that’s saying something considering Superman already had its own identity crisis, and in fact this film manages to affirm the worst aspects of the character retcon in the Superman movie.
Milly Alcock steps in as Kara Zor-El, and to be fair, she’s trying. You can see the effort. But she’s miscast, plain and simple. The role calls for weight and control, and what we get feels thin. Her early drunk scenes are rough to sit through. It’s the kind of acting that makes you wonder if anyone on set has ever seen a real drunk person before. It doesn’t read as pain. It reads as play acting.
The bigger problem is Ana Nogueira’s script, which gives her almost nothing to work with. Kara spends most of the film as a wandering, half-engaged loner bouncing between alien bars. She’s hungover, she’s sarcastic, and she’s got a quip for everything. That’s the whole character. After a while, it stops feeling like personality and starts feeling like filler.
Then there’s Ruthye, played by Eve Ridley, who gets nearly equal screen time for reasons that never become clear. She’s out for revenge against Krem of the Yellow Hills, played by Matthias Schoenaerts. That setup sounds fine on paper. On screen, it’s dead air. Krem is one of those thinly written villains where the script just insists he’s bad and hopes you don’t ask questions. No motive, no logic, nothing to latch onto.
The film leans hard into familiar revenge beats and somehow still botches them. The payoff is weak, capped off with a jailbreak sequence that makes zero sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. There are also a few on-the-nose feminist moments that feel less like storytelling and more like the writer checking boxes. It’s not clever, and it’s definitely not subtle. I also don’t want to spoil it, but this movie may also have the worst needle drop in superhero movie history.
Jason Momoa shows up as a wisecracking bounty hunter, which sounds like a safe bet. It isn’t. He drifts in, cracks a few lines, and drifts right back out without changing anything. Even the action can’t save this. The effects look uneven, formulaic, and with the dark lighting everything feels oddly cheap. This is supposed to be a major studio release, not a rushed streaming project.
David Corenswet’s brief appearance as Superman only highlights the problem. You get a quick reminder of a character who at least had some hope and heroism, and then it’s gone. What’s left is a film that feels unsure of what it wants to be.
That’s where the bigger concern kicks in. If this is what the DCU looks like under James Gunn, there’s a real issue. Nogueira’s script doesn’t show much control or insight, and knowing she’s attached to Wonder Woman should give fans pause, if not outright panic attacks.
Supergirl is likely to crater worse than The Flash, it’s hard to see strong legs here. It’s sloppy, it’s unfocused, and it wastes its lead character. This should’ve been an easy win. Gunn and team have had plenty of time to get this right. Instead, it feels like DC is already slipping back into old habits. DC Studios, and really Hollywood writ large, needs to accept that the era of those cynical “deconstruct the hero” stories is dead at the box office.
***
English (US) · 