'Supergirl' Review: DC stumbles on a stale script

Supergirl is your standard, middle-of-the-road comic book movie. That means it provides you with surface-level entertainment–there are much worse ways to spend your time–but it also means it’s mostly flat in its characters, plot, and themes. The avenues where new ideas could be explored are barely brushed upon, such as the differing ideals between Superman and Supergirl, which you might assume would be a natural idea to explore given how they’ve been handed back-to-back summer tentpole films. But even an idea as seemingly fundamental as this is presented erratically and delivered with mixed messaging. Without tonally fresh and consistent ingredients, what is left over is stuff I’ve seen before. The characters are stereotypical, the world is repetitive, and the story structure has been rehashed dozens of times. It’s not a horrendously bad movie by any stretch, but, at the same time, these issues are what make it bad because such comic book mediocrity has existed for decades at this point.

Luckily, in a movie filled with such tedium, Milly Alcock proves to be the only certifiably good aspect of Supergirl as the film’s star and stands at the peak of its quality. She embodies Kara Zor-El with effective versatility and a frankly badass presence. The spotlight on her excellent casting and performance only grows larger when you compare her against her peers, who make up the steep decline that is the supporting cast. Taking one step down this hill yields Eve Ridley as Ruthye, a totally fine and serviceable character but entirely one-note, with the writing behind her providing little depth. She’s just focused on revenge for her family—a family we never get to know, and whose deaths were executed in one of the goofiest ways imaginable.

Tumbling further down the slope finds Jason Momoa as Lobo, a forced actor insertion who exists merely to spout cringe dialogue and blow things up on a ridiculous motorcycle. His role in the film is disastrous given the extent of his plot relevance, though he at least injects some lively energy into the mix, whether you like it or not. All of which brings me to rock bottom: Matthias Schoenaerts as Krem, one of the most forgettable villains you will not remember within a few weeks. His performance isn’t even all that bad; he’s just stuck playing an aggressively generic bad guy in a group of space pirates with an equally generic name.

Supergirl starts off by throwing you into a Star Wars-esque world, which feels like a lot to take in all at once–even more so than the already bustling comic book Metropolis that Superman introduced. There’s an abundance of aliens and creatures, combined with plenty of ships and bars, which makes the Star Wars connections particularly apt. Unfortunately, this is more like a Temu version of Star Wars. The characters often look and sound uncanny, saying very artificial lines, while the settings consist of similarly looking drab and empty planets. What’s even worse is that the film breaks whatever feeble immersion it had in the first place by using classic Earth tracks as its only intergalactic music.

Furthermore, the core story is weak, contrived, and predictable, while the themes are only intermittently present. The plot begins with the aforementioned family tragedy as well as the gimmick surrounding Krypto getting poisoned–a plot device that does not work because we know with absolute certainty the dog will be fine. From there, the beat-for-beat progression that follows is so straightforward that I was repeatedly able to guess the next rough line of dialogue or plot point. Thematically, Kara has good emotional moments, but they’re brief and mainly swept under the rug until the very end. The film scarcely bothers to examine Kara’s layers and character, which results in muddled and contradictory messaging across the story regarding revenge.

Supergirl simply needed a deeper story with a much more furnished script attached to it, because it in no way had the same impact Superman did. While Superman felt cheesy and simple at times, it still presented itself in a remarkably fresh manner. Supergirl misses the mark there because it does not take the time to delve into its themes properly, which were already superficial. Since a story focusing on morality is nothing new, the filmmakers involved should have treated this as an opportunity to be more inventive. Instead, the movie leaves things at a run-of-the-mill level, has Kara do a couple of things Superman wouldn’t do, and leaves it at that.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, silly inconsistencies rub salt into the wound. To address the elephant in the room, the infamous ending needle drop feels entirely out of place, almost like it was ripped straight out of a YouTube Kids music video. On the whole, the film’s soundtrack and vibe come across as Craig Gillespie doing a bad, try-hard James Gunn impression, because none of the music choices fully land. In fact, the music in the trailers was far better, which makes things all the more baffling. The technical facets also take a dip in the third act. The CGI is invariably iffy and the editing questionably shaky. Ruthye practically teleports in multiple instances, and there are frequent, disorienting cuts during action. It’s messy and clunky through and through.

Comic book films are so formulaic at this point that if you’re not breaking the mold in some groundbreaking way, you’re not going to succeed. If you saw any of the marketing for Supergirl, then you essentially saw the whole movie–the full film offers little in the way of extra value. That’s unacceptable, especially given the fact that James Gunn, as co-head of DC Studios, stated that each script would be fully finalized with a focus on quality before entering production on them. This script was just too weak, and I needed more from it–you can’t just recycle tropes and call it a day. Again, I didn’t hate this movie. It’s completely watchable, the action functions fine, and I loved Milly Alcock’s eclectic performance. But it’s clear DC needs to hit the reset button after this.