Review: 'Supergirl' serves up DC Comics' cynical side, and gives Milly Alcock a chance to shine as Superman's jaded cousin
If you like your superheroes surly, then director Craig Gillespie’s “Supergirl” is right up your alley — though you may wish, as I did, for more for the young woman of steel to do in the second movie of James Gunn’s DC cinematic era.
What you may know about Supergirl — either from her 1959 comic book debut, the 1984 film with Helen Slater, Melissa Benoist’s portrayal on TV (2015 to 2021) or Sasha Calle’s too-brief appearance in “The Flash” (2023) — is that she’s Kara Zor-El, Superman’s cousin and the second survivor of the destruction of the planet Krypton. Unlike Superman, aka Kal-El, aka Clark Kent, Kara did some living before arriving on Earth.
In this movie, those experiences — seen in flashbacks, with David Krumholtz (“Oppenheimer”) and Emily Beecham (“Little Women”) as her parents — have made Kara (Milly Alcock) more jaded about the universe. Clark, Kara says at one point, “sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth.”
Kara spends a lot of time off-world, usually looking for planets with red suns like Krypton — because on those planets, she can get drunk and not have superpowers. She rides around in a junker spacecraft that looks like an RV on the inside, with her sole companion her dog, Krypto, who stole Gunn’s “Superman” out from under David Corenswet in his blue tights.
Rookie screenwriter Ana Nogueira’s story starts with a brutal scavenger race, the Brigands, who terrorize a family in the middle of nowhere. The Brigands leave behind a teen girl, Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who vows to kill the group’s leader, Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), for revenge.
Ruthye’s father managed to destroy the Brigands’ ship before he was killed, so the group finds a new one to steal: Kara’s. When she puts up a fight, Krem hits Krypto with a poison dart — and a healer tells Kara, through Ruthye, that she has three days to find Krem to get the antidote.
Kara searches for the Brigands, and Ruthye tags along, though the two disagree strongly on what will happen when they find Krem. Ruthye intends to kill him, while Kara needs him alive to get the antidote to save Krypto.
What follows are a series of fight scenes, some of them in dive bars that make the Mos Eisley cantina look like a Best Western. In one bar, Kara and Ruthye encounter Lobo (Jason Momoa), a bored immortal who works as a bounty hunter. Lobo is a DC Comics fan favorite, I’m told, and Momoa brings the same comical menace to the role that he did to “Fast X” and “A Minecraft Movie.”
Gillespie’s action sequences are serviceable, if overly reliant on CGI and whiplash-inducing camera moves, in a narrative that borrows a little too much from Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies.
The best part of “Supergirl” is Kara herself, and the way Alcock finds the sweet spot between the goody-goody hero and the sulky, despondent survivor. Hopefully Gunn & Co. will bring her back in a movie that makes full use of her bad attitude.
——
‘Supergirl’
★★★
Opens Friday, June 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action, language, and smoking. Running time: 107 minutes.