Supergirl

NOW IN THEATERS! Danger. The new DCU is in big trouble, and sadly, Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl has been tanning under a red sun for far too long. Things need to change at DC before it’s too late. Here’s why…

Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) is celebrating her 23rd birthday the only way the last Kryptonian woman can…on a planet circling a red one, where the powers go quiet, and the drinks actually work on her. Her dog Krypto is along for the ride, the one piece of her old life on Argo City that gives her any joy. The last thing Kara wants to do is return to Earth and live with her cousin, Clark Kent (David Corenswet).

Kara’s party is interrupted when a young woman named Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley) shows up seeking help, exacting revenge for her father, Elias Knoll (Ferdinand Kingsley), death at the hands of a space pirate named Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts), the leader of a crew of raiders called the Brigands. But Ruthye is in way over her head, and when the local townspeople start ganging up on her, Kara and Krypto step in to help…barely. Krypto gets poisoned by Krem for his troubles and then steals Kara’s spaceship to boot. Now Kara and Ruthye must hunt down Krem to get the antidote for Krypto and kill him for vengeance.

“Krypto gets poisoned by Krem for his troubles and then steals Kara’s spaceship to boot.”

While traveling across the galaxy, Kara and Ruthye run into more space pirates, an alien bounty hunter named Lobo (Jason Momoa), and a slew of danger that triggers flashbacks for Kara of her parents, Zor-El (David Krumholtz) and Alura (Emily Beecham), and to the final days of Argo City before it was gone for good.

I’ll admit, I had my trepidations coming into Supergirl, but man…what a profoundly awful movie. I’m still trying to figure out how this script got greenlit. The fundamental problem starts with what kind of movie this is even trying to be. There’s nothing wrong with a drama about someone’s struggles — I’ve seen plenty of films about PTSD, about people whose worlds get rocked by tragedy. But as a superhero movie? Quite frankly, this film should have been the first act of a larger Supergirl story, but instead, all we get is Gen Z angst.

Milly Alcock doesn’t help matters. She’s miscast as Kara Zor-El. There are things the role asks of her as an actor that she just can’t pull off. Her drunk acting at the start of the film might be the most inauthentic portrayal of intoxication I’ve seen on screen, as if she’s never actually been drunk in her life. I get that Kara is supposed to be depressed, but “depressed” comes off as “way too laid back.”