Supergirl - Review

Supergirl opened in Indian theaters on June 26 in English, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu.

---

Craig Gillespie's Supergirl arrives as the second entry in James Gunn's rebooted DC Universe, carrying the weight of following last year's Superman, which managed the difficult trick of reintroducing a very well-known, iconic character with warmth, wit, and a coherent sense of purpose. Supergirl, unfortunately, does not manage the same trick, and this film instead offers you a long, episodic chase across alien planets that struggles to find its dramatic engine, despite a capable lead performance and a premise that, on paper, has potential.

The film's central conceit is that Kara Zor-El (unlike her cousin Clark) was old enough when Krypton died to understand what she was losing. She was there when it happened, leading to her carrying a trauma that has never fully resolved into anything resembling a stable identity. This backstory is interesting enough, and the film gestures at it throughout. But gesture is as far as it gets. The screenplay, written by Ana Nogueira, sets up the emotional architecture of a character study and then does almost nothing with it. What it does instead is fill the space with a pursuit plot where the stakes never feel exciting enough to carry the film.

A Quest Without Propulsion

The story kicks off when Kara, on a solo interstellar drift to mark her 23rd birthday, crosses paths with Ruthye Marye Knoll, a young girl hunting the brigand Krem of the Yellow Hills for murdering her family. Krem then poisons Krypto, Kara's dog, forcing her into a desperate cross-galaxy search for the antidote before her companion dies. Let’s be clear here, this is a B-movie premise at best, but it can absolutely work if the execution keeps the momentum up, but Supergirl never understands this. The story overall lacks narrative propulsion, and there are multiple moments that feel like it is about to deliver something before failing to do so.

You can see this repeating throughout the film: you can see the shape of what a scene is reaching for, feel the space where the payoff should land, and then watch it not arrive. It is not that the individual scenes are badly staged or incompetent in a technical sense. The effects are well done with an adequate production design. The problem here is that the failure is structural and tonal in nature. The screenplay does not give the film's set pieces any weight to push against, so even when the action is technically present, it registers as inert.

Alcock Carries More Than the Script Deserves

Milly Alcock does her best work with what she has been given, which is both a compliment and an indictment of the material. She plays Kara as rowdy, carefree, and abrasive, a character who wears her grief as attitude rather than vulnerability, and that reading of the role is the most interesting thing the film has going for it. Alcock has screen presence and a naturalistic ease that makes even the flatter scenes watchable, but she cannot manufacture dramatic tension where the screenplay has declined to provide it. The film's most significant formal choice, holding back Supergirl's iconic costume until the climax, requires the audience to invest in the character's arc as it builds toward that moment. But the arc does not build with enough momentum to make the eventual suit-up feel like a payoff. By the time it arrives, the film has already exhausted whatever goodwill it built.

Milly Alcock does her best work with what she has been given, which is both a compliment and an indictment of the material.

Lobo, Wasted

Jason Momoa arrives as Lobo with the energy the role needs: physicality, swagger, the look completely locked in. On paper Lobo should have been the anarchic wild card that should inject unpredictability into an otherwise linear story. In practice, the character has almost nothing to do. His scenes are moments with no meaningful contributions to the larger narrative, and his removal from the film would change almost nothing about how the story functions. Compare this to how Superman handled its secondary characters. Edi Gathegi's Mr. Terrific, Nathan Fillion's Green Lantern, and Isabella Merced's Hawkgirl all had clearly defined roles in how the story moved and what their presence meant. None of them were leads, but none of them were useless in the story either. Supergirl already has fewer supporting characters and therefore less to juggle, and still mishandles the ensemble.

Matthias Schoenaerts’ Krem is perhaps the film's most significant liability. A villain who does not feel threatening is one of the harder problems to recover from in this genre, and Krem never projects the menace or danger that the film's revenge-driven premise requires. He exists to be pursued and confronted, but not to be feared, and that absence of pressure deflates the story's urgency at every turn.

A villain who does not feel threatening is one of the harder problems to recover from in this genre, and Krem never projects the menace or danger that the film's revenge-driven premise requires.

Two Steps Forward, Four Steps Back

What is most dispiriting about Supergirl is what it implies for Gunn's larger project. Superman demonstrated that the DCU reboot could work, that a film in this franchise could understand its central character, build a meaningful world around them, and leave the audience wanting more. Supergirl understands its title character, sure, but nothing beyond her. The wider universe virtually feels absent here, with the supporting cast feeling like furniture, and the film's tonal register never settles into anything consistent enough to carry an audience through two hours of interplanetary travel. A cousin who won't pick up calls, a dying dog, and a girl with a grudge should be enough to build something compelling around. They are not, here.