We’re approaching two decades of the box office dominance of superhero movies, during which time they’ve transitioned through just about every subgenre imaginable, including espionage thriller (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), neo-noir (The Batman), heist comedy (Ant-Man), and jukebox musical (Joker: Folie à Deux).
So, you’d be excused for thinking that Marvel and DC are struggling to find a new angle from which to iterate on the familiar curves and swerves of the superhero genre. This is ultimately what hurts DC’s newest effort, Supergirl, the most. Despite being fairly light on its feet, Craig Gillespie’s bratty, high-flying space western is fatiguingly overfamiliar in a genre that can’t help but keep looking backward for inspiration as it clings to relevance.
One of the last two remaining Kryptonians, Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) and her canine best bud, Krypto, are celebrating her 23rd birthday. Kara spends her time planet-hopping in a half-drunk stupor trying to forget the pain of losing her home, while her do-gooder cousin, Kal-El (David Corenswet), urges her to establish a new one on Earth with its superpower-giving sun.
One night, while dancing in a seedy bar on some backwater planet, Kara meets Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a young girl seeking revenge for the death of her parents at the hands of Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), the leader of a group of space-faring human traffickers. Though Kara initially refuses to help, an altercation with Krem sees Krypto caught in the crossfire and fighting for his life. Kara begrudgingly joins Ruthye in tracking down the villain in a bid to save her only friend and discover the hero she can be as they cross paths with a trio of “glitch” pirates, a bevy of extraterrestrial thugs, and Lobo (Jason Momoa), an interstellar bounty hunter with an attitude.
This Supergirl is very different to the ethereal bombshell played by Helen Slater in the 1984 cult classic, the fiercely optimistic version inhabited by Melissa Benoist in the late-2010s CW series, or the ferocious take on the character briefly brought to life by Sasha Calle in the doomed 2023 Ezra Miller vehicle The Flash. As written by Ana Nogueira and conceived by James Gunn, this Kara is a punk-lite party girl with a devil-may-care attitude, less Joan Jett than Charli XCX. With a glint in her eye and a shock of shaggy blond hair, Alcock is the impudent flipside to Corenswet’s dimpled boy scout, with Noguiera’s script ably teasing out what makes the character more complicated than her more famous cousin.
While Superman symbolizes and embraces hope, Supergirl has always been animated by despair at losing her home and her people. That’s no exception here, and the film’s scale—smaller and more personal in comparison to other superhero movies—allows the themes of home, grief, and resilience after loss to shine bright, even when the set pieces leave something to be desired.
Gillespie’s direction betrays a discomfort when it comes to action, with scenes of mayhem that are always amping up but never quite peak despite the post-riot grrrl indie-pop needle drops on the soundtrack. More curious still is the way the film frequently leaves Kara’s fisticuffs entirely off camera or just out of sight, cutting many would-be banger sequences off at the knees.
Throughout, Supergirl draws from at least 10 different long-tapped cinematic wells. The main touchstone is Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies, but the filmmakers borrow liberally from westerns and samurai pics, while also pinching from Star Wars and Mad Max, all of which are derivatives of those classic genres, giving Supergirl a feeling of being a copy of a copy of a copy. Schoenaerts’s strikingly grotesque Krem, his face encrusted with subdermal piercings, feels like an early draft of a Mad Max baddie, and Ridley has the unenviable task of trying to wring genuine pathos out a role we’ve seen played many times before by more gifted adolescent performers like Natalie Portman and Hailee Steinfeld.
But Supergirl’s closest spiritual antecedent is Kathy Yan’s Birds of Prey, which won a dedicated cult of fans and critical appreciation for how it managed to spin its more familiar genre elements into anarchic, girly-pop perfection. Alcock’s Kara Zor-El, like Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, has all the makings of a character ready to step out from the cultural shadow of the male character she’s derivative of and go her own way. If only the film had the same guts.
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