His Kryptonian Cousin: SUPERGIRL

Supergirl got dinged for the same exact things that have made other—better received!—superhero movies underwhelming over the last decade. It’s thinly imagined, visually sludgy, narratively limp, and loaded with gobs of bland special effect chaos trying to gin up excitement. For a comic book movie its locations and populations are as sparse and overfamiliar as its story. Hop across the galaxy and everywhere looks the same, listens to American songs, and is inhabited by human (or human-ish) people. But what somehow punches through this blandness is Supergirl herself. We met Milly Alcock’s Supergirl when she crashed into the end of last year’s Superman to pick up her super-dog Krypto from big cousin Clark Kent. She made a fast fun impression with a disheveled and irreverent youthful energy. Now starring in her own movie, Alcock continues along those lines, playing the 23-year-old Kara’s sense of cosmic displacement as a version of post-collegiate malaise. It’s a fetching combo befitting a melancholy lark. It has just enough going for it to make its all the more disappointing to watch it fall into cliche—cartoony violence, gentle quips, pop music cues, and an overall dilution of a fun take on a cool character through monotonous moves. 

Supergirl is pretty super, though. She knows her powers, and her responsibility, but she’s trying to dull the senses and ignore her calling. She preferred checking out to stepping up. We catch her touring planets with red suns, since they sap her invincibility and allow her to get drunk. Yet we see she has good core virtue. In finely rendered pulp backstory we see the destruction of her home planet Krypton through the eyes of her father. (David Krumholtz plays him, radiating compassion while emoting through a nonsense language.) He instills in her a goodness that her stumbling can’t erase. And it’s there when she needs it when an orphaned girl asks for help getting revenge on space pirates who killed her family. The movie really is that simple, a single arrow shot straight to its target. But the movie doesn’t quite match that potential, giving her a rote plot of meager spectacle and moral muddle to enact. (How does she spend the whole movie preaching against vengeful violence and then—spoiler!—kill the villain after she could easily have taken him to space jail?) Throughout, from story beats to set design, it makes the expected choice every time. It’s the sort of movie where even the surprises aren’t that surprising. Alcock is so lovable, and her backstory so sympathetic, that it’s easy to root for her. But it’s hard to keep one’s interest afloat when she’s punching bad guys in slow motion in the middle of a swirling cloud of CGI. It’s enough to make one wish she could fly off into a better movie. Critics and trolls pretending this is a calamity are mistaken. It’s just more of the same.